


Mirror, Mirror

by jane_potter



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Bath Sex, Bathing/Washing, Blow Jobs, Canon Blending, Community: norsekink, Explicit Sexual Content, Hand Jobs, Intercrural Sex, Internalized Homophobia, Light BDSM, M/M, Politics, Rough Sex, Sexual Tension, War, Whipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-10
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 03:58:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jane_potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"<i>Thor</i>, they called him in voices edging on sneers, <i> god of empty thunder. God of meaningless noise, god only of men who cower like children at storms</i>." It began with Odin and Frigga's decision not to discourage Thor from learning magic as a child. The oldest son of Odin would become a trickster and a sorcerer, befriended only by three warriors in all of Asgard; the second son would be raised to know the truth of his heritage, and rise to fill the gap of his brother's irresponsibility by taking up the hammer Mjolnir and fighting his very nature in order to become a warrior-- and they would become gods unlike anyone's previous imagining.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a [prompt](http://norsekink.livejournal.com/6119.html?thread=9672423#t9672423) on [norsekink](http://norsekink.livejournal.com/) that asked for a role-reversal fic based on a piece of Balphesian's [concept art](http://balphesian.tumblr.com/post/11560704608).
> 
> This was supposed to be a 2000 word fill written in one weekend, and turned into a 34K epic that covered half of my NaNo. I regret nothing.

Odin's firstborn son was a boy, big and golden and happy. He was full of laughter right from the cradle, with an infectious smile and a laugh that Frigga's handmaids fell over each other to coax out of him.

Frigga was the first to notice that one day it was _Thor_ who, by gambolling and making faces and chewing on his toes while looking at her upside down, cheered a heartbroken maid into smiling at him-- and he barely crawling yet.

Frigga also noticed how the concealed but faintly noticeable bruise on the maid's cheek disappeared after she had cracked a watery smile at the baby and picked him up to cuddle.

They were sure of Thor's spark of seiðr by the time he reached a half century in age, toddling rambunctiously. His nurses swore up and down that they were trying _so_ hard not to lose track of him, but every time Thor went to wobble energetically out of a room, a vase would break or an aquarium shatter or something else cause a commotion behind the nurse, and by the time they had tended to the hazard, Thor would be long gone. It could only happen so many times before Frigga and Odin recognised the cause.

"He is my firstborn son," Odin said, frowning deeply. "If we do not encourage it--"

"We might stamp it out of him?" finished Frigga delicately, dangerously. "He is _your_ son, Odin. Precisely. What, pray tell, would this realm be if some red-haired young man had not dared to put on skirts all those millennia ago?"

"It is no longer strictly necessary to follow that custom, I think," Odin muttered, but that was that.

Thor learned seiðr from both of them. Odin walked in on Frigga and his two hundred year-old son in skirts only once, Thor blushing furiously but too eager for the lesson to refuse, and quickly Odin left them to it before Frigga could tell him to join. From Odin, Thor learned battle magic, unlike the more delicate weaving of what was by then known as "woman's work," but frowned and grew bored when he found it could not make nearly as many people laugh.

Decades passed, and the court rumbled with dissent as the beamish mageling who ran the corridors of the royal palace grew more and more confident in his tricks.

They were harmless things, swift and almost painless, always aimed to give Thor and everyone else (save the victim) a laugh. Odin would have discouraged him save that Thor had a sense of honour even in that; he was an even-handed trickster who never bullied or picked unfairly at one person. Sometimes, Frigga noticed, Thor's pranks were vengeance-- but never for himself, only for another, a scorned woman or a bragging warrior who Thor felt needed to be taken down a peg.

But the court disapproved.

"Do you forget," Odin finally roared to the hall at large, one night at a feast, "who it was that built this world, and how?"

They had tried to, it seemed. Odin's words made them quiet their tongues, but as Thor grew older, they none of them seemed to change their minds about the little seiðmaðr their rulers were raising as an heir. That Thor was a friendly and buoyant boy probably spared him a great deal of grief, as did the fact that all his running and scrambling about had made him strong, but it could not make up for everything.

"What kind of prince can't even hold a sword?" demanded one thane's son, in words that Frigga knew came from his father's mouth.

Thor's face was dark. "Damn your swords," he said. "They're no fun, anyway."

Frigga pulled both boys' ears, Thor's for his language. She did not, however, pull it when every sword that the thane's son picked up for the better part of a month turned into a snake. Well, a wiggly sort of creature, anyway.

"They were supposed to be manhoods," Thor muttered, and buried his face in her lap, but he was giggling and Frigga couldn't help but give a shocked laugh herself.

He giggled significantly less when she sat him down for a talk about the body and its parts and functions, male and female both. Frigga's serene gaze in the face of Thor's squirming discomfort told him quite clearly just what that was punishment for.

 

*

 

Thor was nearly three hundred, old enough for Frigga to have seriously begun worrying what would happen when it was time for him to join his agemates in training, when the war with Jötunheimr finally ended. Odin came home missing an eye and holding a baby.

Thor had a complicated relationship with books: he hated them on the principle that he could not run around while reading, but adored them for the knowledge they contained. Nonetheless, after Odin's return he immediately buried himself in the library looking for a spell that could fix his father's empty eye socket. Frigga found him asleep on a book far above his ability level more times than she could count.

But it was a blessing, for the baby Odin had brought her was trouble enough on his own. A little jötunn child, half-starved and noisy at first-- and unknown at every turn. When Odin told Frigga that Loki, like all jötunn children, suckled not milk but blood, Frigga had to sit down quite hard. The sharp little fang in Loki's mouth was the cause of more bloodied gowns than Frigga knew what to do with.

Yet for all the promise of his heritage, Loki grew to be a quiet and serious child, nothing at all like the boisterous bruiser Frigga and Odin had expected. He was ever his brother's audience, pleased to smile at every joke, no matter how unfunny, as long as Thor would carry him around on his back or lift him up onto a garden wall or eat dinner with him. And no question about it, there was seiðr in Loki too.

The sight of what Thor faced, as he began his official training and grew sullen at having to spend his time learning about things that did not sparkle or burn or change shape or turn to smoke, was enough to make Odin grimly reluctant to raise Loki the same. At the same time, Frigga counselled again how unkind it would be of them to deny their child's nature-- _particularly_ in Loki's case, as a young warrior with no learning in seiðr could cause only disaster if his inborn ice magic ever burst out of him.

Given the circumstances, teaching him seiðr was not a question: there was no choice but to teach Loki at least enough magic to manage his natural gifts. The problem still remained, however, as to how much knowledge was _enough_. Did they give him the training that Thor had?

Yet Loki nearly solved the problem for them, for he was keen and _observant_ in a way that Thor never had been. His eyes cut into the complexities of situations, whereas Thor only ever cut into people deeply enough to know what would make them laugh or be laughed at.

Loki knew what torments a seiðmaðr faced among the Æsir, and he wanted no part of it.

"And will you forswear yourself, then?" demanded Frigga of Odin in a low and angry voice, in the dimness of their bedroom. This woman in her dressing gown, hair and tongue unbound, was not one the court would ever see as their queen. "Raise your sons on the oath that they must be true to whom they are, that you will never see their true selves curbed for Asgard's prudishness, while you tell Loki nothing of his father?"

"His mother."

"Do not debate semantics with me."

"Should I announce Loki to the court, then?" Odin snapped. "Would you have me endanger the claims of both my sons to the throne?"

"I said tell _Loki_ of his parentage," Frigga sighed, gentling. "Surely it will be necessary to tell him wherefrom comes his affinity for ice."

Odin turned his face to look at the hearth, firelight gleaming from his inscrutable eye patch. "He is clever. He could not _not_ know then that I had already lied."

Frigga laid her hands on her husband's shoulders. "He is not Thor. He will understand the necessity of it, and control his emotions. And if you fear to speak because you think he will be angry now..."

"He is not old enough to keep the secret."

Frigga laughed. "Loki was _born_ to keep secrets. Teach him politics, my husband, and Asgard will never be the same."


	2. Chapter 2

Thor grew wilder, his unfriendly days in the sparring ring leaving him more and more disposed to sullenness and temper. The pittance of time he had left for seiðr meant that his natural reluctance to sit still and study worsened into outright refusal. He wanted what time was left to him for tricks to be spent on _tricks_ , not books. He began to learn by trial and error that left Frigga and Odin alarmed and angry at the risks Thor took.

But he would not be curbed or reasoned with. The academic principles that he already knew were a solid enough base on which to raise his mischief, but a base was not enough when reaching into the complex tangle of powers that was higher magic.

Eventually, an incident with the beautiful golden hair of the fierce little girl who was trying to make her name as a shield maid brought Thor back to heel. He, attempting to make her hair impervious to being hacked at, as was the custom of the boys trying to bruise Sif into quitting, made it all fall out instead. Sif's mother howled far louder than Sif herself did, to be honest, but that was nothing compared to the guilt and remorse that drowned Thor when Sif's long hanks of golden hair began falling out in his hands.

And yet he was still wild, for what did Thor do but take off for the dwarven forges almost immediately, swearing that he would repay Sif for what he had done (and ignoring that nobody, let alone she, had demanded such repayment of him)? Barely six hundred, Thor went, and came back a fortnight later with his arms full of treasure and his mouth bound by bloody black thread.

He earned back the court's love for that, because Asgard did appreciate its heroes. Relieved as they were for Thor's safe return, Odin and Frigga could not help but think it would have been better if Thor had come back to the same sneers as ever... because his rashness had been rewarded, and his cavalier jokes about mouth-binding, two weeks later, were laughed at, and Asgard had learned that much more tolerance for Thor. And he took advantage of it.

So Thor grew wilder, and Loki simply _grew_. By the time he was three hundred, he was twice the height Thor had been at that age, and with that size and a determination that Thor had never possessed, Loki took to martial training almost easily. It did not _suit_ him at all, that much Frigga could tell: she could not count the nights that she found Loki sobbing in his room over his bruised and broken fingernails-- not because they hurt, but because they were _broken_ and her fastidious little boy did not like that.

Yet he kept at it, stubbornly, for even though Odin and Frigga both had made it clear that Loki's jötunn heritage would never be held against him, would never be considered an automatic fault that he had to make up for, Loki clearly felt differently. He felt the truth of his identity as a sword hung over his head, a hovering threat should he ever fail to be _good enough_ , and could not be convinced otherwise, for even though tales of bloodthirsty jötunn monsters had never been told in their chambers, the same could not be said for what Loki heard from his peers and the court. Frigga mourned.

Loki learned politics and economics and court manners and compromise, all the things that Thor could not or would not. The time he spent dissecting old treaties and budgets, at least, suited him. He was a sharp, swift knife of a child, easily given to bargaining and bribery and subtlety. Odin looked favourably on the son who showed promise at learning to handle the affairs of the realm, and Thor looked favourably on the brother who took their father's pressures from him.

And Loki grew. And _grew_. The speed at which he gained height put him well above his agemates by the time they were five hundred, which meant that he began to draw ahead in the sparring ring. That the court murmured approvingly of this did not seem to get through to Loki, however, who suffered too deeply for his distaste of battle to grow vain from the praises that were heaped on him for it.

"You favour the spear," Frigga noted one night, as they worked quiet seiðr to ice the bruises on Loki's ribs. (The only lesson necessary was to teach Loki the motions to disguise his inborn abilities as something that could pass for Asgardian magic.)

His face flinched. "I wish to wield Gungnir one day," he replied, too quickly and in the tone of someone who had said it to many others already.

"Do you," Frigga said blandly.

Loki's eyes overfilled and spilled before he could dash the tears away, much to his evident humiliation and shame. The ring had beaten more than bruises into her son. "I hate letting them get close to me," he rasped, something hot and violent in his eyes, a frantic frustration too long suppressed. "I _hate_ it when they knock me into the dirt and hit my face and--"

"Ranged weapons--"

"--are unmanly," Loki said brusquely, and Frigga winced. She could tell that the skewed lessons someone else had already taught him would not be easily untaught.

When he turned six hundred a decade later, she took him down into the vaults to see Mjölnir.

 

*

 

Odin had taken Thor and Loki down to see Asgard's war spoils centuries ago, and taken Loki again some time later, alone, to show him the casket. Frigga knew not what had transpired between them in the vaults that day, but her son had emerged silent and white as a sheet, seemingly able to keep his legs beneath him only because of the strong hand Odin had kept on his shoulder. Odin had spoken little of that day; certainly Loki had said nothing, but it did not escape Frigga’s notice that thereafter Odin became far more careful to respond when Loki’s eyes begged mutely for a share of the attention Thor could so easily monopolise.

There were times when Loki disappeared-- not an infrequent event-- that Frigga has some inkling he might have spent standing before the casket, confronting whatever demons he had (or imagined he had) inside of him, but she had no proof of that. If Odin knew, he did not tell her.

That time, though, she did not take Loki to see the casket.

"This is Mjölnir," she told him, as they stood before the hammer on its pedestal. "It was forged by dwarves for a warrior long ago, and re-forged more recently in the heart of a dying star by the dwarves your brother bargained with. It has a reach of however far you choose to throw it, and a constancy that will always bring it to your hand when you call. Any warrior of Asgard or Valhalla would be honoured to call it his or hers."

Loki didn't blink at her inclusion of women in that group-- although it would have been more correct to say "woman"-- for Frigga had been Sif's most vocal supporter ever since Sif had earned a warrior's place at the table alongside Thor. His eyes were fixed on the hammer.

Frigga said nothing of the runework that had been added to Mjölnir upon its reforging, of the spells which governed its ownership. Loki's self-doubt in his blood was enough that he would have automatically thought himself unworthy if he had known his worthiness was a matter for testing, and that could have be enough to render him truly thus, for Mjölnir was not an object lightly wielded. So Frigga simply watched.

Loki did not take the handle immediately, as Thor might have. His clever, too-scarred fingers traced the knotwork on the angled planes of the head, the clean new leather bindings on the haft, the glimmering silver-white marks where the handle, once too short, had been lengthened with molten starmetal. He took the measure of Mjölnir, seriously and thoroughly. Then, at last, his face settled into determined lines and he took hold of Mjölnir by its handle--

\--and lifted it from the pedestal, the muscles in his arm flexing.

"It's heavy," he commented absently, turning it this way and that to examine it more closely. A pass of his free hand sent his untrained seiðr feathering through the metal. "Mother, is there... runework in this?"

"Aye," smiled Frigga, gripping Loki's elbow to guide him out of the vault. "You might ask your brother of it."

The next morning at breakfast, Loki entered the mead hall with Mjölnir on his belt and Thor by his side. Even alongside his grinning, swaggering brother, who usually rendered Loki cold by comparison, Loki _swelled_ with happiness. Before seating himself, he came to Frigga, bowed deeply and kissed her knuckles, then looked up at her with a thoroughly self-satisfied smile tucked in the corner of his mouth.

Though Loki's birthday feast had been but the night before, Odin announced a second feast that night. In practice, the celebrating went on for a good three days more.

It was almost enough to drive from Loki's eyes the hollow light that hatred of the sparring ring had put in them.

Meanwhile, there were other worries. Within a few short decades, the very last traces of the slim, fine-boned boy Loki had once been had vanished. With Mjölnir in hand, his training had only intensified, putting muscle on the body that, it seemed, would _not_ stop growing. And growing. To the amazed guffawing of his agemates, Loki was measured for new armour nearly each decade, and even the most generously cut robes were too small within two.

Baffled, Thor confided in Frigga that Loki had begun to have nightmares of being tall. She could tell that envy sat uneasily on Thor, who rarely found others' situations cause for jealousy... but the fact remained that he was two centuries older than Loki yet still had the stubbornly apple-cheeked face of a boy.

What cause did his brother have to complain of _height_ , Thor thought, Frigga's son who could not yet attract the maids he was beginning to enthusiastically appreciate, and who could not possibly know better than to think Loki ungrateful.

"Will this ever stop?" Loki whispered hoarsely to Odin one night, his eyes nearly white-rimmed with anxiety, only for Odin to look back at him in grim silence.

Were Loki not too old to bury his face in Frigga's lap, he might have spent his tears on her gown. As it was, she saw their marks on the pillow slip when she went to wake him the next morning, offering every small solicitous gesture that Loki would still accept. As the years passed, he turned in upon himself more and more, attempting to find strength in cold rigidity.

The fear of Loki's jötunn blood thrusting itself inescapably to the surface began to tighten the knot around their hearts, filling their family with a tension that Thor was visibly baffled by. Just as that knot reached strangling degrees, however, it was suddenly… over.

There was no denying the relief in Loki's eyes as five, ten, fifteen years crept past and he did not so much as test the seams of his latest clothes. Still, it was not until a good three decades later that the last knots of tension in his shoulders finally eased away.

Thor would tease Loki for being vain for centuries to come, and Loki would never cease to irritably reply how it was not wrong to enjoy having good armour that he could count on fitting for more than ten years. Frigga quietly stitched engraved buttons and decorative silk braid and subtle, extravagant embroideries on her younger son's court clothing, and gave him all the small moments of enjoying fine things unmarred by the sparring ring that she could.

Loki's final height was nothing unnatural. Though he towered above his peers, who were only just beginning to grow, Loki was of a height with warriors with five times his age. Tall, strong-limbed and early grown... and nothing more.

Yet the court still chose to marvel at Odin's strapping young son, who carried himself so elegantly and was so conspicuously, handsomely well controlled ( _not like Thor_ , was the whispered addition, _not like the trickster-- like a good prince should be_ ).

Thor was still wild, generally satisfied with jesting for the group of young warriors who flocked to his merry-making and adventuring. He did not hear the whispers, and, though Odin began to frown and Loki looked on with his joyless, thinly disapproving eyes, they did not tell him... but it was only a matter of time.


	3. Chapter 3

_Thor_ , they called him in voices edging on sneers, as he neared his first millennium, _god of empty thunder. God of meaningless noise, god only of men who cower like children at storms_.

"But of course I am your thunder, Loki!" Thor shouted at his brother, who stared at him in shock over the desk of paperwork that Thor had just upended. "What else could I be but a useless rumble trailing after your flash, never half as bright or swift?"

And Loki, faithful Loki, who had even to that day been his brother's best audience, willing to offer a smirk or chuckle (no matter how forced or how alone he was in doing so) for every one of Thor's tricks, did not understand how his brother couldn't see what Loki had done for him. Ever with his fingers in the knot of Asgardian politics, he could not fathom how Thor lived without hearing the muttered rebukes and disapprovals Loki faced for encouraging Thor.

"It isn't my fault," he told Frigga, spots of furious colour high on his pale cheeks. "He brings this on himself!"

"You could have been him, had you but honed your own powers."

"I was wiser than that," Loki snapped, compulsively fingering Mjölnir's haft.

Loki's swiftly shortening patience with Thor's tricks made it storm over Asgard for nearly a week. Thor made it rain _inside_ Odin's finest mead hall until the All-Father's roar sent him stalking from the palace in stung, blind fury.

Thor grasped and grasped at the collection of warriors who still gathered to his booming presence, but the number grew ever smaller and his joy became steadily more brittle, more forced. For the first time in his life, the eyes of Frigga's firstborn boy were other than joyfully carefree. And they could all see there that Thor _did not understand_.

"I am not without use," slurred Thor. "I... have talents. Brother, I am _good_ at what I do."

He sat on the floor slack against Loki's legs, lolling his head back against Loki's thigh to fix his unseeing eyes on the ceiling. Hands folded neatly in his lap, Loki regarded his brother without pity through hooded eyes but remained seated in his desk chair, ignoring the reading he had been at when Thor had fumbled drunkenly in. The flameless crystal light globes that Thor had once ensorcelled for him clustered overhead, illuminating the study long after the midnight candles had burned down.

"Asgard does not favour what it is that you do," Loki said quietly.

"Why?" moaned Thor. "Why is the seiðr you work with Mjölnir so much better than what I do without it?"

"I do not work seiðr," Loki retorted, far too hotly for the mildness of the comment Thor had made. He bit his tongue in self-chastisement. "And you do not work war magic."

"I could," Thor muttered resentfully, taking the last quarter of his flagon in one swallow. Then all the sullenness seemed to drain out of him, leaving only hurt bafflement. "Brother, _why_?" He fumbled at Loki's knee as he attempted to turn around, pulling his robe drunkenly in an effort to stay upright. Loki hissed in displeasure. "Tis not _fair_."

"Life is not fair," snapped Loki. In his belt, Mjölnir crackled with blue static. "Get off, you oaf."

"Loki," Thor insisted pitifully, pulling at Loki's robes even more as Loki attempted to free himself. " _Lo_ ki. Brother, I... brother, do you still love me? Do you still--"

"Thor, you are foolish, not _stupid_ ," the younger prince snarled, planting one boot on Thor's chest and shoving him to the floor. "What have I _ever_ done to make you doubt that I do?"

Flat on his back on the stones, Thor blinked several times before breaking out in a wide, inebriated sneer.

"Nothing ever at all, my perfect brother," he growled, and vanished into thin air with the gold signet ring he had filched from Loki's belt pouch.

 

*

 

The first time Odin sent Loki to lead a diplomatic party from Asgard to Álfheimr, the willowy courtiers of Ýdalir laughed behind hollowed hands, bragging to each other in voices not subtle that this one or that one of them would have the fine pretty boy-prince on his knees within a day, his back within a week. All agreed, as Loki and his embarrassingly humble trio of accompanying guards strode to meet the king in his hall of yew, that surely the men of Álfheimr would ruin young Loki for any other race, and ruin his chances of ever succeeding in politics as well.

Before the king's throne of living oak, Loki did not simply incline himself but _bowed_. Behind him, the crowd had difficulty stifling their scornful delight at how the callow Asgardian prince practically prostrated himself before their king.

Several seconds later, delight turned to red-cheeked fury when it became apparent that their tall, fey birch of a king would have to bend himself nearly double to surpass the degree of respect Loki Odinson had done him, and that all others in the hall would have to take knee when their king rose to bow.

The following fortnight might have gone differently, had the Ljósálfar but known the boy they were trying to trick into surrendering Asgard's claim to half of Álfheimr's forests had been the architect of the last three sweeping trade agreements struck between the two realms. Loki spent a great deal of his time blinking wide eyes at the politicians around him and nodding shakily. Then, three days later, he smiled like a cat as a graciously accepted the scroll which signed over the remainder of Álfheimr's royal woods to Asgard from a stunned and extremely rattled elder councillor.

Not only did Loki leave the realm of the light-elves entirely untouched, his sharp tongue having sent dozens of would-be suitors stumbling away only in humiliation, he departed with the court's preeminent swordsman bound in his service for the next century and a day, and nobody was quite certain how it had happened.

"They say the maidens of Asgard are also very fine," Fandral said hopefully, as they awaited the Bifröst in a grotto outside Ýdalir. The dark young prince merely gave him a look full of steel and ice, implicitly superior and somehow impugning Fandral's intelligence with only his eyes, and Fandral found himself wondering how any one of them had ever imagined to bend such a warrior to their whims.

"Do your service for my brother," Loki said boredly when they had reached Asgard. "I have no need of you."

And he walked away, leaving Fandral standing abandoned in the middle of the All-Father's great mead hall, surrounded by curious stares and suddenly feeling that his fine pastel linens and silks were quite shabby as compared to the Asgardians in their heavy finery, furs and armour and great metal clasps.

And here he was, bound to serve a man whom the Nine Realms spoke of as wicked and careless and cruel, a shame to his parents and ancestors.

Yet somehow it was not an awkward fit, Fandral's binding to the trickster prince and his lone, brutish maiden shieldmate. Within weeks, the darkness in Thor's suspicious eyes gave way to a genuine delight and an eagerness to entertain that startled Fandral. It took but a half-year for Thor and Sif's long, joyless treks from condemning Asgard to turn into lively, competitive quests for whatever lost treasure caught Fandral's imagination that week. Thor and Sif did not even seem to mind overly much when the Ljósálfr's quests more than occasionally lead them to a dead end and a night spent regaling the sympathetic maids of some little hamlet's tavern with the sad tale. Sif merely rolled her eyes and made Fandral pay for her ale, and soon Thor's booming laugh would have him with a lapful of maiden all his own, seiðmaðr or no. Fandral could soon not comprehend how Thor was not known far and wide as the boisterous soul he truly was-- too ferocious for Fandral's tastes, sometimes, but giving and eager for adventure.

Asgard's absurd distaste for magic, perhaps. Fandral would never understand it.

 

*

 

It fell to Frigga to watch and quietly listen as knowledge of Loki's gathering power in politics spread throughout the Nine Realms and then lapped back to Asgard in the form of rumours, like ripples bouncing from the side of a pool and returning to their point of origin. Soon enough, the name of Loki Odinson was treated as carefully as his father's in any of the Nine Realms, for it was never known when Odin would send his second son to speak for him in negotiations. Perhaps it was even spoken more cautiously, for it was rare indeed that the All-Father ever left Asgard, but the lords and rulers of other lands could easily expect to someday play host to the ruthless, silently demanding god of lightning.

 _He trains hard, our second prince_ , said the warriors, nodding to one another over their cups. _Do we ever see Thor out in the ring any longer? He keeps too much company with the woman and the elf. Loki carries the burden of making up for that lack. Little wonder Loki takes so little joy in fighting-- he has no energy for it. He cannot be blamed for that, can he? He trains hard. That is enough._

Within the decade Loki sat upon Odin's council, second only to the All-Father himself. It was then that the oldest of Asgard's nobles, who had chaired the highest table of Asgard for centuries before Loki's birth and who held fast to the traditions which surrounded firstborn heirship, finally found the limits of their love for Odin's second son.

"Will we not see Thor join this council as well, All-Father?" asked one, black eyes shrewd beneath his drawn brows. "He has well made his name in adventuring."

 _He has spent enough time wandering, and it would be well to finally reign in the heir before he shames all of Asgard_ , it was meant.

 _Better a firstborn fool on the throne than a secondborn warrior_ , it was meant.

"We will not," Odin said, his blue eye cold, and was not challenged.

But standing unobtrusively nearby, breath caught in his throat, Loki saw the grim tightening of Odin's hand on Gungnir's shaft and did not feel relief of any sort.

There were ripples throughout the realms as the years continued to pass. Odin said nothing as what had once been a small conflict in the mountains of Svartálfaheimr smouldered and seethed over into the underground cities, as stories of blood and fire were carried back to Asgard by the stone-faced traders who still dared to venture to the dwarven forges for craftware, however fine. Odin said nothing, but it was the unspoken darkening of his face that had all of Asgard's warriors training harder, longer.

It did not help anyone's sense of foreboding that storms thundered over Asgard almost constantly. By that point, Loki had so withdrawn from society that he could be only found when he was within the training ring, where few would still chance a spar with him for fear of the ruthlessness that plagued the second prince when he was short of temper. Loki spoke to no one kindly enough to make polite requests, let alone apologies for the weather.

"Well, look at you now, brother," Thor's mocking voice hailed Loki as he stalked down what he had thought was an empty cloister. "I could almost think all your protests of distaste for the ring are lies, for the amount of time you spend there."

Loki halted abruptly and spun on his heel to find Thor lounging on a railing with an ugly smile on his face. The long silk of Thor's hair was blown about in the damp wind that whipped in from the courtyard. Loki knew it was only the poor light from the leaden grey clouds outside that made Thor's eyes look so shadowed, but he did not delude himself into thinking that there was not true anger in them, also.

"And look at you, Thor," he snapped, "who still remain such a child that you will not grow even the imitation of a warrior's beard. Must you make your derision for us all quite so apparent?"

Thor's face twisted a little. He hadn't thought his motivations so pathetically transparent, then?

Loki turned away again. "If you have nothing of use to say, then some of us are busy making useful contributions to Asgard in this hour."

He startled badly at Thor's sudden appearance directly in front of him in a flare of orange seiðr, one hand flying to Mjölnir's haft. With Thor glowering and thrusting himself into Loki's space, it became apparent that Thor actually had a scant few inches of height on Loki-- not that it usually mattered, considering that he lacked that size on the rest of his body. Driven by rage as it was, though, the fist Thor made in the collar of Loki's chain mail very nearly seemed threatening.

"As am I," Thor rumbled, his teeth set and bared. There were dark rings under his eyes, and the odour of old paper clung to him like a musty breath. "Think what you like of me, Loki, but I too am making ready to make war when it comes. You will find yourself surprised."

"I think not," said Loki coolly, slapping Thor's hand away. "And it is not my opinion you need concern yourself with, brother. It has never been my opinion against you-- not that you ever noticed."

He did not give Thor a chance to reply, but stalked off to the baths in an even fouler mood than he had been in before. Outside the palace, thunder cracked and the clouds broke open in sheets of icy rain which Loki had not the temperament to feel at all sorry for.

When he glanced over his shoulder, the cloister behind him was empty.

An emissary of the Dökkálfar arrived in Asgard twelve days later, his olive-grey skin still shiny with the dust and sweat of battle against the tyrant laying waste to the mountain strongholds and cavern-cities of Svartálfaheimr.

"We beg the aid of the All-Father," he croaked. "I am Hogun, son of Bron, and I have been empowered to swear the forges of Ivaldi, Sindri, Eitri and Brokkr to oaths of service to Asgard for ten years if Asgard's warriors will come to aid us for but one."

"We will send our finest," Odin said, and shook the windows of every hall in the palace with Gungnir's booming clang. Before the entire court, he stood silently for but a moment before slowly, without looking once at Thor, turned his face to Loki. "And my son will lead them."

"We will send Thor," said Loki decisively.


	4. Chapter 4

The plains of Svartálfaheimr smoked and crackled, evil-scented gas hissing from fissures in the plates of baked rock that covered the surface as far as the eye could see. The earth where the Bifröst had touched down was hot beneath the soles of Loki's boots. Behind him, Sif shifted from foot to foot and Fandral wrinkled his nose with a theatrical noise of disgust; Thor seemed unaffected by the stench of sulphur (more than likely because of the vile concoctions he was accustomed to mixing for his tricks) but he tapped a restless staccato on the hilt of a dagger with his nails. The three old thanes who had accompanied the group grimaced and muttered to each other. Hogun alone stood seemingly unaffected.

"Nice place you've got here," Fandral said lightly, prodding at a charred lump on the ground with the tip of his sword.

The Dökkálfr's face was like stone. "Three days ago, this was the entrance palisade to a city of twelve thousand."

The lump below Fandral's sword rolled over to stare up at them with empty eye sockets. Sif sucked a sharp breath between her teeth.

"We go to the tunnels," Loki ordered grimly.

There was almost nothing left below, not even bones. The wooden beams of the shops and homes that had been built into the natural subterranean caves had burned away, leaving only stubs of charcoal still sunken into the post holes drilled into the rock. Pockets of smoke and poisonous gas still lingered in dead-end antechambers, threatening to choke the unwary fool that wandered into them.

Almost the moment they had set foot in the tunnels, Thor had tossed a ball of white light into the air and struck off ahead of the group, eyes narrowed. Moving more cautiously down the broad subterranean causeway, the rest of them watched as he strode from wreckage to wreckage in the semi-gloom, crumbling great chunks of charcoal in his fists and sniffing them, licking the smear of black ash that he wiped with his fingertips from one wall.

"My lord Loki," whispered one of the old thanes harshly, "what is he _doing_ here?"

"Balefire," Thor announced loudly, his face hard and set. "And other magics I know not. Seiðr of the darkest kind."

"What do you know of this, Son of Bron?" Loki asked Hogun, ignoring the noble's question.

"As little as any of my people. Seiðr has never been the way of the Dökkálfar."

"And the Svartálfar?"

"Forge magics only, as far as I know."

"Thor," said Sif, her tone one of forced levity, "you should be able to tell us of dwarf magic, eh?"

The scars on his lips pulled as his mouth twisted in a grimace. "Nay, not of this. I saw nothing like this in Brokkr's forge."

"Heimdall," called Loki, his voice echoing in the great empty caverns. "Begin sending down the troops."

 

*

 

Battles still raged in the crags and tunnels all across Svartálfaheimr, fought against beings who, as far as anyone could tell, were as much Dökkálfar as any of their victims. To Loki's frustration, he could not persuade the enraged citizens and soldiers of the cities to keep a single enemy captive alive for questioning, even after he had furiously and very publicly exhorted the importance of gaining knowledge of their unknown enemy, having finally lost his temper after arriving for the fifth time in a recently embattled city only to find all the potential captives slain.

As often as Loki verbally lashed his commanding officers (often while Thor snickered just behind his shoulder, to his deep irritation), the Æsir warriors who fought alongside the Dökkálfar and Svartálfar could do nothing to prevent mobs from tearing their enemy entirely apart.

"It seems I must do this work myself," Loki snarled to the old noble who had been standing at his elbow and hovering like a particularly annoying fly, attempting to counsel him. "And you had best be back in your cups on Asgard when I return, Thane Orm." ****

*****

It was apparent from the beginning of Asgard's involvement that the Æsir warriors were deeply unsettled by the entire situation. They muttered and winced at the emotionless faces and smooth, stone-like flesh of their hosts, whose skin ranged from the dark grey of slate to light olive barely touched with ash; they balked at sleeping in the inns of the underground cities even when torches were kept burning day and night, and nearly refused to make temporary camp in empty mineshafts or the caverns where the Dökkálfar farmed nutritious lichens.

Knowing well how badly the war could go if his soldiers lacked motivation (though they could not outright rebel), Loki wore himself ragged with constant travel along the front lines, visiting the troops personally. It was hardly his preferred option, but he had reluctantly discarded flogging as a viable motivational tool in the current circumstances.

And yet the warriors did not react half as well to him as they might have, for everywhere Loki rode, Thor accompanied him. Surly and snappish, Thor stirred up trouble even as Loki smiled falsely and spread reassurances, played petty tricks for his own amusement as Loki tried to cajole their men into better spirits. They met him with baffled and angry stares, their faces openly wondering why he insisted on bringing his brother with him. Loki bit the insides of his cheeks, glowering on the inside at Thor's behaviour, and continued on.

"You might re-consider your strategy," Fandral murmured one day, over a meal of unleavened bread and tough, stringy meat that Loki hoped sincerely (but probably in vain) was not lizard. He winced as another burst of outraged shouting arose across the dim cavern and a circle of men scrambled to stamp on the snakes that had slithered out of their ration bags.

"I will inform you when I want your counsel," replied Loki astringently. "Thor rides with us until I say otherwise."

"And when will that be?" demanded Hogun, who also travelled with their small group. He openly disapproved of Thor, not on the basis of seiðr but purely for Thor's behaviour. Loki, to his fascinated surprise, had found that he genuinely _liked_ Hogun.

Loki got to his feet again, brushing the crumbs from his armour and wincing at the coating of oily grime that his fingers met. "We are for Hraunfossar," was all he said, striding towards the post where they had hitched the sinuous, reptilian beasts that Hogun had procured for them as mounts.

Fandral groaned, stuffing the remainder of his meal into his mouth and scrambling to follow Loki as Sif went to extricate Thor from the knot of angry soldiers he had been surrounded by.

 

*

 

Odin sent a tersely worded message demanding that Loki remove himself from the front lines. ( _You are barely seven-hundred, and this is the first you have seen of war; do not be so rash_ , was the essence of it.) When Loki disregarded it, Odin sent a second, even sharper in tone. A third went to Thor, ordering him to return to the relative safety of the higher caverns with his brother.

Thor read it aloud to their group, met Loki's glittering eyes with a hot, reckless stare of his own, and then laughed as he burned the missive to ash.

 

*

 

They travelled on through the endless night of Svartálfaheimr's caverns, driven by Loki's mounting frustration with the enemy's unpredictable guerrilla attacks, which meant that they were ever arriving in another ruined village or sacked forge to find only the aftermath. Tunnel warfare was swift and vicious, unlike anything the Æsir had fought before. Between long rides, Loki burned countless hours poring over maps of the settlements that had been attacked, attempting fruitlessly to predict where the enemy would come next.

"So for once your great mind cannot solve the problem," Thor chuckled into his cup of dwarven liquor. Dressed all in dark robes, he was all but invisible where he skulked in the shadows at the back of Loki's makeshift tent. "Clever Loki is without answers."

"It is unwise to taunt me, Thor," Loki warned, his voice a gravelly rasp for lack of sleep.

"It is unwise to leash me, Loki," Thor replied in a growl, "but you have forbidden me to speak with our soldiers. Where else should I go but here?"

Teeth bared with fury, Loki lurched to his feet. As if he had been waiting for just such a reaction, Thor surged up also. He was nearly panting, the colour high in his cheeks, and trembled visibly with--

\--with what effort, Loki knew not. It left him suddenly unbalanced. Sucking in a harsh breath, Loki gritted his teeth and turned away, forcing himself to unclench his hands.

Thor snarled unintelligibly and vanished in a flare of orange seiðr. Driven to such distraction that he was finally forced to abandon his maps, Loki spent the remainder of the night pacing his tent, viciously chewed by the memory of the hot hunger that had burned in Thor's eyes.

 

*

 

Ten days later, they finally stumbled by accident across a group of the enemy hurrying down a tunnel that crossed their own path. The chase was short, the fight brutal, and at the end of it Loki stood with a feverishly triumphant light in his eyes, looming over a bloodied Dökkálfr who gasped and squirmed beneath Mjölnir's weight. Thor had two more pinned to the earth with long daggers through their arms and feet, and Sif held a fourth at sword point.

Loki's temper long denied did not make him hasty or thoughtless. On the contrary-- it made him patient, ruthless and entirely thorough. The Dökkálfar screamed for three days before he was satisfied.

"Hogun," he said, as he calmly wiped blood off the knife Thor had lent him, "send word to our generals. We take the battle to their camps, now."

 

*

 

Hogun slid the blank-faced silver hand mirror back into the velvet bag it was stored in, tightening the drawstrings carefully before he looked to Loki. "The closest Asgardian troops are in Sundr. They will be here in six hours."

The mirror was an ancient and utterly invaluable piece of technology that enabled them to speak across great distances with their commanders all along the front lines, who held the mirror's counterparts. Though Loki knew little of magical crafting, he could tell that the technology was unsurpassed by even the Æsir's best technicians, and thus that it spoke volumes of the Dökkálfar's trust in Asgard-- or, rather, their desperation-- to have given them loan of such a treasure. Every time Hogun brought the mirror out, Thor looked stupidly torn between his desire to steal it and the remains of his sense of honour.

Loki settled himself neatly on an outcropping of rock and folded his hands over one knee. “Very well, then,” he said. “We'll wait here for them.”

Thor's roar of frustration echoed down the tunnel, agitating the lizard mounts into a series of little whuffling chirps. “Are you _mad_?” he demanded. “You would have us sit here and do nothing while the enemy we have been chasing for three months is nearly close enough to _spit_ upon?”

“Yes, and you're yelling fit to bring the ceiling down on our heads,” Sif said. “The prisoners told us this was a main camp, a permanent one. It won't be moving any time soon.”

“You trust their word?”

“I trust Loki's knife,” she retorted. And Loki could appreciate how cleverly worded that statement was, to remain a truth by not professing Sif's non-existent trust in Loki himself.

“Besides,” said Loki calmly, “they number in the hundreds, Thor. Walking in there alone would be suicide.” He stood and lifted a hand to his neck, cracking it audibly. His shoulders ached beneath the weight of his helmet. “Thor, Fandral, Sif, stand guard in the intersecting passageways. Alert me when our men arrive.”

“And where exactly are you going, brother?” growled Thor.

“To take a nap,” said Loki tartly, removed his helmet and sat down against the wall to do precisely that.

Fifteen minutes later, he heard the rapid crunch of Sif's footsteps approaching on the gravelly earth.

“My prince!” she said in a breathless rush, without bothering to drop to one knee first. “Thor has...”

“Gone, has he?” Loki finished, without opening his eyes. “My, my. I didn't think it would take him that long.”

“We must go after him!”

“We _must_ do nothing,” snapped Loki. Sif recoiled a little at the harsher tone of his voice. “My orders stand.”

He could well imagine the expression on her face as she struggled with the warring urges to obey and to punch him in the mouth. “You knew he would go if you told him not to.”

Scornfully, Loki said, “Of course I did.”

“You've sent him off to _die_!” Sif yelled, surging to her feet. “Your own _brother_ , you soulless--”

“Sif Sif Sif let's not be hasty now,” said Fandral hurriedly, running up from behind her to grab what sounded like her arm, probably stopping her mailed fist in midair. “I'm sure the prince has a plan of some sort, yes?”

“Yes,” said Loki. “Wait here for the soldiers.”

Several long moments of silence elapsed. Loki opened one eye to glance up at the two warriors standing over him, Sif white-faced with rage and biting the inside of her lip furiously to hold in her words, Fandral looking suddenly queasy and uncertain.

“Ah. Yes,” Fandral said faintly. “...Of course.”

Loki lifted an eyebrow at Sif. “Am I not understood?”

She stared furiously at him for a few moments longer before clapping her fist to her breastplate in rigid mockery of a salute. Gravel sprayed as she turned on her heel and stalked away. Fandral followed after a moment, casting a stunned glance over his shoulder as though his years in Thor's company had conditioned him to expect Loki to leap up and announce that the whole thing had been a joke.

In the gloom across the passageway, Hogun sat watching Loki in narrow-eyed silence, his thoughts inscrutable on his face. Feeling similarly disinclined to break the silence first, Loki shut his own eyes once more, even if the nervous clench of his stomach never did allow him to actually sleep.

 

*

 

To his mild surprise, Sif and Fandral were still there when the soldiers arrived five hours later. Much as he could see that it chafed on Thor's companions (or perhaps _because_ he could see it chafed them), Loki waited until the very last soldier had arrived, then had all the men dismount their giant reptiles and get into parade formation, though of course they would break ranks the moment battle began. Sif's fists were clamped with rage, and Fandral looked oddly... betrayed.

Loki ignored the way his stomach flipped at the look the Ljósálfr was giving him, for he had never made choices based on what would gain him friends. (Admiration and respect-- that was different. But never friends.)

Firmly at the head of the column and with Mjölnir swinging in his hand, Loki lead the warriors down the twisting passage towards the enemy camp at nothing faster than a brisk walk, his cape snapping behind him. He could practically _feel_ their bafflement at his strange leadership, their impatience and snappishness.

And yet every last man of them faltered when they rounded the last bend and stepped into the enormous cavern where the enemy Dökkálfar had made camp.

Sudden light assaulted their eyes, a great bright swathe of sunlight pouring down into the huge cavern through the hole overhead where the earth had been blasted open right to the surface. Even so, the cavern was too large for them to see the other side of it-- and it was a still, silent field of slaughtered bodies and broken tents as far as the eye could see. A haze of dust and seiðr smoke hung over the carnage. A disbelieving hiss rose from the warriors behind Loki as they edged hesitantly into the cave.

In the centre of the cavern, on top of the pile of rubble that had collapsed from the shattered ceiling, sat Thor, seated with his elbows on his knees and staring ominously down at them all. His black robes were grey with dust and his fine, golden hair was sticky and dark with blood.

"You're late, brother," Thor called, and took a loud, crunching bite of a fresh red apple the likes of which had not been seen since they had departed Asgard.

Loki walked calmly into the carnage, stepping over bodies. Here and there he was thinly pleased to notice a Dökkálfr stirring faintly, alive but pinned to the ground with Thor's daggers through his appendages. Thus, when one leaped up from the ground and rushed him with a hopeless scream, Loki swung Mjölnir in a casual arc and reduced the elf's skull to pulp without breaking stride. The haft of his blood-wet hammer smacked back into his hand with a _crack_ that echoed through the stunned silent cavern.

“You missed some,” he replied evenly, stopping at the foot of the rubble heap to look up at Thor, his posture full of the iron restraint of a general who had seen countless wars rather than that of a prince who had seen barely one. From above, Thor alone could see the astonished triumph in Loki's eyes, shining out wild and breathless from behind the barely held facade. Nonetheless, Loki's voice remained crisp, cool and perfectly in control as he said, “Now if you're quite done having fun, I believe we have a war to win.”


	5. Chapter 5

Almost instantly, it seemed, the tide of the war had turned. In the wreckage of that one permanent camp, they found dozens of communiqués and maps, entire scrolls of battle orders-- not only past and present but future as well. Before the smoke had even dissipated up through the jagged hole in the cavern's ceiling, Loki had dispatched nearly three hundred warriors to other enemy camps. Even with the best local guides to aid them, they could have searched Svartálfaheimr's underworld for months without locating a single one of the caverns that housed the enemy's camps except perhaps by accident. With the maps in Loki's hands, however, four groups of Asgardian warriors returned victorious in the space of a single day.

The camp that Thor had destroyed had been a major supply checkpoint. The network of roving enemy bands which depended on it for food and replacement soldiers collapsed within days. Every village and forge within ten thousand els was cleared of the enemy in the space of a fortnight.

In each new camp they discovered a trail leading back to another. The war turned on the information Loki had so long been seeking, and Asgard's army struck down through the tunnels like floodwaters, dealing death even more brutally and swiftly than normal in exchange for the long months of frustrating guerrilla warfare they had been subjected to. Suddenly the enemy that had been stalking them through the dark for months was the prey. Hogun's exceptional tracking skills, upon which Loki's small band had relied so dearly for weeks, were soon utterly unnecessary. They rode on the ever-advancing front lines, moving with such speed that they often ran across small campsites littered with hastily abandoned equipment and food barely beginning to char on the spits.

Save for the balefire carnage wreaked at Reykholt that very first day, it was not a war of seiðr. Not, that was, until Thor finally found a target.

Enthusiastic as they were, the Asgardian warriors were not accustomed to tunnel warfare. It was very unlike the frantic ambushes they had fought off in the wide open spaces of the cavern-cities. The narrow, twisting passages forced them to move one or two abreast, choked the free swing of their weapons, threatened them with sudden pitfalls and falling stalactites at any moment.

Thor had no such difficulties. Soon stories of him had rippled through the army that was spread far and wide through the underground lands—stories of the ensorcelled crystal globes full of light that he left hovering to illuminate dark passages for the soldiers behind him; stories of the gases and fogs that he sent down dark holes to choke out the enemy within. Stories of a gold-haired prince with bloody knives in his hands and a grin on his face.

“Good morn, brother!” said Thor merrily, just after appearing in a flash of orange seiðr-light right next to Loki and the handful of warriors with him. In shock, one man nearly slid off the edge of the treacherous ledge that they were all crouched on. “Having a bit of trouble?”

Loki scowled at him, hunching lower behind the outcropping of rock that was all which saved his skull from the arrows that the enemy Dökkálfar were trying to put through it. “Just get rid of them, Thor.”

Thor grinned with infuriating cheer. There was a cut on his lip and a bruise on his cheek, and he had never looked more alive. “Since you seem to be having such trouble doing it yourselves,” he said, vanishing again in a second flicker of orange light.

Moment later there came the sounds of knives through flesh and shocked yells that bubbled off into blood. When Loki and his men stepped carefully around the outcropping of rock on the four-inch ledge which curved around it, they found only bodies and blood and a mocking bit of bright light floating over the scene.

And so it went. Aye, the warriors continued to curse Thor for the shocks and surprises he gave them, the obvious delight he took in making them yelp, but each muttered curse came swiftly followed by a word of grudging admiration.

 _Who is this Thor_? asked the warriors, stunned in the wake of the happy slaughter Thor had wreaked. _Where has this man been for so many years? Perhaps he will finally be the heir he should be_.

Loki listened, and heard... and could not convince himself that the triumph he had been expecting did not feel instead like cold, ashen fear in the pit of his jötunn soul.

*

In a storm of blood and seiðr, the combined armies of Æsir and Dökkálfar and Svartálfar swept through the great network of tunnels and caves beneath the barren, inhospitable wastes of Svartálfaheimr's great plains, driving their enemy before them. Months later, it was a hardened and war-hungry group that finally wrested control of the last cavern-cities from enemy hands, emerging like shadows from the earth into the half-forgotten light of the surface at the place where the caves ended-- the base of the enormous granite mountains which cut into the sky like teeth.

“Is there anything to your realm except down too far and up too high?” Fandral asked Hogun one day, in the middle of a gruelling climb through a steep and treacherous mountain pass.

“Too hot and too cold,” Sif replied in jest, wiping sweat from her face, and it made Thor laugh.

Loki discreetly gestured for Hogun to join him a little farther up the column. He said nothing in apology for the jokes his companions made about Hogun's homelands, which the Dökkálfr emissary had seen sacked, burned and razed for the last ten years-- but then, Loki's silences could be nearly as profound as Hogun's, and they both knew it. Quietly, Loki approved of how explicitly Hogun proceeded to ignore Thor and Fandral's later invitations to share their campfire.

They fought and bled their way upwards against an enemy that tried to push them back with ever increasing desperation. Thor walked alone against three score of the enemy and set fire to half a forest; Loki used Mjölnir to bring down such a heavy downpour of rain that it washed out the entire camp that had been set up at the base of a ravine. Where bridges had been smashed by the enemy's retreat, Loki and Thor soared across in their own different ways to pursue, leaving the army scrambling to construct hasty bridges and follow their princes.

In the strongholds of the Duergar, the Svartálfar nobility, they found thanes with haunted eyes, women and men who had ruled with impunity for thousands of years only to be broken by the occupation of ten years. Loki listened to their stories with narrow-eyed attentiveness, Thor with clear impatience.

“Something is amiss,” Thor hissed, in the room their Duergar hosts had granted them for the night. The huge bay windows that took up an entire wall overlooked a snowy chasm far below, for the chamber nearly thrust right out from the cliff that the citadel had been cleverly carved into.

“Oh?” murmured Loki. He was far more concerned with scrubbing off the grime that had been on his skin for the last three weeks, silently cursing the dwarf-sized bathing tub they had been given.

“They have been subjugated to this enemy for seven years! How can not a one of these thanes know the name of the tyrant who conquered them?”

“Fear is a powerful thing.”

“They should fear Asgard.”

“Not more than they fear the seiðr that could burn their stone strongholds to ash.”

Thor frowned deeply. “We have seen no more evidence of seiðr since Reykholt.”

Loki scoffed. “Come, Thor. You really think that if the enemy had a seiðkona powerful enough to work that kind of evil, they would only use her once? More than likely she's been in the mountains keeping control of the Duergar this entire time. Controlling the cavern-cities would hardly have been their highest concern.”

Thor's chuckle made him look up sharply.

“You disagree?”

“Ah, brother,” Thor said, his smile a hard-edged thing. “A seiðkona powerful enough to work that kind of evil is not _used_ by anyone. If such a woman exists, she is the enemy commanding this entire war. But really,” he added, snorting, “if this seiðkona existed, surely the enemy would have spoken of her by now.”

Looking troubled, Loki went back to bathing, but spoke little for the rest of the night.

*

The next morning, he was woken by a rustling at the foot of his bed. Eyes slitting open, he listened for a moment before wrapping his hand tight around Mjölnir's handle and flinging it, leaping out of bed as he did so. The hammer struck a wall of hard air next to Thor's head and thudded off.

“What are you _doing_?” Loki demanded, seeing his brother kneeling in front of Loki's open chest of belongings and surrounded by the mess of papers and maps they had salvaged from the enemy's camps.

“Who is Mogul?” asked Thor in return, his voice a growl.

“Thor, get out of my things,” Loki demanded, striding forwards. His hand slid right through the shoulder he had tried to grab.

With a shimmer, Thor reappeared on the opposite side of the room, still holding the papers. “The name Mogul is on all these orders, brother, yet you have never mentioned it once.”

Loki shrugged, his expression annoyed and uncomprehending. “Must have slipped my mind. It's hardly important. Thor, honestly, going through my things at night--”

“No,” said Thor heatedly, “you will not distract me from this.”

“What is there to distract from?”

“I told you months ago that the balefire at Reykholt could have been made with a mass sacrifice by untrained fools, or with an artefact of some kind. You had no cause to assume that the enemy had a single powerful seiðkona.”

Loki was very still for a moment before speaking calmly, in tones meant to shame Thor's intelligence. “Thor, don't be stupid. I could hardly rule it out.”

“Because you _knew_!” Thor roared, slamming down his fist on a table. “You knew the name of this Mogul and you told none of us!”

“What good would it have done?” Loki demanded, abandoning his fiction and his patience. “Mogul managed to enslave half of Svartálfaheimr and burn the other half. Any assault against such an enemy would be the undertaking of _gods_. Would you have me tell the people whose villages she destroyed that their enemy is not merely a group of Dökkálfar like themselves, a rebellion of anonymous enemies that needs to be broken, but a single tyrant? The idea of it would fix itself in their history forever. They would dedicate their lives to finding her, launch countless doomed quests and die like swatted flies.”

“ _Liar_ ,” Thor rasped, in a voice strangled with rage.

“I do what is _necessary_ ,” Loki hissed back, his face pinched and full of resentment that had lain long concealed. “One of us has to.”

At that moment the door to their chamber swung open. Standing with the morning reports from their generals in one hand was Hogun. One glance at the Dökkálfr's murderous expression told Loki exactly how much Hogun had heard.

“You will speak of this to no one,” Loki ordered, drawing himself up into a regal posture at once. “Have you no respect for the privacy of royalty?”

Hogun's rigid face twitched. “This is Svartálfaheimr's war,” he said. “You had no right to keep that knowledge from us.”

“This is a war that Svartálfaheimr asked Asgard to fight for them,” Loki retorted. “And I will conduct it as I see fit.”

“Then you meant to leave our enemy alive at the end of this all.”

“I meant to keep your people from running off to be slaughtered like sheep.”

“We have already been slaughtered like sheep,” Hogun snapped, in the most emotional display Loki had yet seen from him. “Now we must avenge our families.”

“Not while I lead this army,” said Loki with deadly quiet. Blue static crackled around the hand that still gripped Mjölnir. “Now will you keep your silence, or will I ask Thor to show you what he knows of dwarven magics?”

Thor's eyes flew to Loki in startlement. Hogun's merely narrowed at the threat, his mouth hard and set. After several seconds of long, tense silence, however, he inclined his head a grudging inch. Dropping the reports on the ground, he turned on his heel and left.

“Is he not your friend?” asked Thor, sounding shocked.

“I do what is necessary,” repeated Loki quietly, suddenly nothing so much as exhausted. “Not that I expect you to understand that.”

“You are not the only prince here, brother!” Thor snarled, his temper flaring immediately.

“Then prove it,” Loki retorted, turning cold, pitiless eyes on Thor. “Show me that you know what is demanded of the heir to Asgard's throne.”

And when they marched again for the next stronghold, there was a great, heavy weight of things unspoken hanging over them-- the Duergar, and Hogun, and Thor, and Loki at the centre of it all.


	6. Chapter 6

Blown and bitten by the bitter wind of coming winter, Fandral huddled deeper in his fur-trimmed cloak. The weight of his heavy Asgardian clothing trapped heat and sweat next to his body, and the stink of old sweat clung in the crevices of his body. Even high in the crags of Svartálfaheimr's mountains, he longed for the light and airy garb of Álfheimr's court. For a moment, he tried to imagine the fey maids of Ýdalir, only to dismiss it as far too melancholy a reflection.

 

“My dear Lady Sif,” he called instead, turning about on the rock he was perched on. “Tell me we have word of the next stronghold. Perhaps it has been abandoned, eh? Or their resolve in holding it has weakened?”

 

“Not so,” she said shortly from her seat nearer the tent, expertly drawing her whetstone down the edge of her blade. “We will have to take it by force.”

 

“Good,” rumbled Thor, as he took a seat next to Fandral. “Fandral, my friend, why so glum? It will be _glorious_.”

 

“I wouldn't call it glum,” Fandral said evasively, with a forced laugh. Thor's delight in the face of further carnage made it feel as though there were a deep and yawning chasm just below Fandral's feet. Not for the first time, he realised just how the vast difference was between being a swordsman of Álfheimr and a warrior of Asgard. “No, it's just--”

 

He stopped and shook his head, attributing the shudder down his spine to the cold. “No. You're right. Glorious indeed.”

 

 _And soon over_ , he thought, for the future was ever the refuge of the optimistic.

 

*

 

Indeed, the end of the year whose service Asgard had pledged came swiftly. Though the enemy had been driven farther back into the mountains, they were not yet routed. More than one of their generals commented on how odd it was that an enemy so thoroughly thrashed should somehow cling together, retaining a semblance of order and purpose. At these moments, a deeply guilty look would crawl over Thor's face, and Loki would inwardly sigh his annoyance. Thankfully, most Asgardians were still highly predisposed to interpret every expression on Thor's face as mischief, and his conspicuous awkwardness went unnoticed.

 

In the face of Thor's immense guilt over such a small falsehood, however, Loki sometimes wondered if his own ruthless sang-froid might not be the product of something deeper than his personality. Much as he tried to dismiss it as nonsense, it nagged at him like the pain of a loose tooth. After all, even Thor in all his careless trickery was burdened with a sense of honour that would have broken lesser men. What did it mean, that only Loki considered concealing crucial information about their enemy to be wise and right? Was that the kind of reasoning that enabled the jötnar to be such monsters?

 

“It will be nice to see Asgard again,” said Fandral, on the other side of the dining table in the private chambers of the Duergar whose citadel hosted them that night, as if he had read Loki's mind.

 

 _And leave these ideas to rot here_ , thought Loki savagely. Damn the war, damn it for all the pointless stress and grime and pain and problems it created, the things it made him question that had no right being called into the light of day.

 

The door of the chamber swung open, admitting the cold air of the hallway. They all looked up to see Hogun enter with three other men behind him, all Svartálfar with slate skin and beards like shaved iron. He did not look at Loki, jaw tight and set. “The sons of Ivaldi,” he announced, then stepped back and stood with his arms folded across his chest.

 

Loki saw Sif glance at him, a question in her eyes about Hogun's ire, which had been apparent for months. “Welcome,” he said instead to the Svartálfar, rising to his feet. “You have come a long way.”

 

“Aye,” grunted one.

 

“We see you continue to fare well, Prince Thor,” said another, the curl of a smirk nearly hidden in his beard.

 

Thor bared his teeth in something like a smile, stretching the scars on his lips, and started to get to his feet.

 

“Please,” Loki said, casually resting one hand on Mjölnir's hilt, “you must be hungry. Will you sit?”

 

The Svartálfar's eyes were all fixed on the hammer at his belt. “We will take our feast in the Lord Vergr's hall,” said one. “We have only come to bear you a message from the forges of Ivaldi, Sindri, Eitri and Brokkr.”

 

“The year that Asgard promised our realm is up tomorrow. We thank you for the most gracious service you have done us, and we do not wish to cause you delay in returning home victorious.”

 

 _Leave_ , it was meant, _for the great forges of Svartálfaheimr are already in Asgard's debt for ten years and do not wish to owe even more_.

 

Loki's eyes slid slowly over each dwarf, weighing the implications of their words. Smith-mages all, bearing the tidings of the blacksmiths whose forges had paid for Asgard's warriors. Dwellers of the cavern-cities that had never experienced the direct tyranny of Mogul, who knew nothing of how dangerous their enemy truly was, and who thought that what remained to be fought was a little matter of clearing out a last few straggling camps of rogue Dökkálfar.

 

“The blacksmiths of Svartálfaheimr are most careful with their commitments these days,” was all he said, reminding everyone in the room of the position that even the most respected dwarf held before the second prince of Asgard. Two of the sons of Ivaldi coloured dark grey. “It seems they learned well from the lesson that my brother taught them.”

 

He could feel Hogun's eyes boring into him.

 

“We will be only _too_ glad to return to Asgard on the morrow,” Loki finished lightly, seeing no reason to resist one last insult. The third Svartálfr twitched with temper. “Thank you.”

 

Hogun did not wait for the sons of Ivaldi to depart before he turned and stalked from the room, his back rigid and shoulders knotted. Scowling, they followed him out.

 

“You cannot be serious,” said Thor, turning his hot-eyed stare on Loki. “You mean us to abandon the war?”

 

“This is not right,” said Sif, frowning after the Svartálfar's departing backs. “There are many of the enemy left in these mountains.”

 

“And no reason to let the people of these villages suffer for their leaders' choices,” added Fandral.

 

Loki looked at him. “Two minutes ago you were pining for Asgard.”

 

“Not before the war was won!” Fandral protested. “I like a maid's lap and a warm fire as much as anyone, but not at the cost of an enemy left to run wild again! Nobody writes songs about heroes who walk off the field with the battle half over.”

 

“And yet our time here is done,” Loki reminded them. “The smiths at whose behest we came have asked us to leave.”

 

“The Duergar have not,” rumbled Thor, laying the words down heavily as his eyes bored into Loki's.

 

 _Stop that, you oaf. I understand what you think you need to remind me of_ , Loki wanted to bark. But his companions were all staring at him, demanding things of him that he had not been prepared to give-- effort, pain, struggle. More death from the so-heavy hammer he wielded. Something in his chest pulled tight, a knot of frustration and anger at being forced into the corner that he suddenly realised he was in.

 

“Get some rest,” he said abruptly, stepping back from the table and making to leave the room with their disbelieving eyes on him. Sif and Thor looked outright mutinous. “We depart early.”

 

*

 

Late that night, a flicker of shadow slipped through the deeper shadows that filled the citadel's hewn-rock halls. Flashes of silver glinted from the polished chain mail and armour not concealed beneath a heavy green travelling cloak. The shadow eased up to a barred wooden door and glided into the dark bed chamber.

 

No candles were lit, but Hogun sat awake and armoured on the edge of his bed, the head of his mace resting on the floor between his feet. The Dökkálfr's cave-adapted eyes reflected an eerie viridian glow as he turned his head unerringly to the open door.

 

“So you have come to put a knife in my ribs,” he murmured, not at all surprised. “I did not think someone as ruthless as you would let me live to tell of the secret you kept.”

 

A low chuckle issued from the darkness, and then a light flared from the bewitched crystal no longer concealed in Loki's palm. “Hardly,” he said, smiling very thinly. “I do hope you got at least _some_ sleep. Find your pack, my friend. We are for the so-called Mystic Mountain, stronghold of Mogul.”

 

Hogun's eyes widened ever so slightly when something rippled in the blackness behind Loki-- a broad shape, a flash of gold hair and fur-trimmed cloak-- a parting of the shadows to reveal Thor, Sif and Fandral standing blanketed in the Odinson's seiðr, all dressed for travelling hard in the cold.

 

Loki's face was weary, strained in anticipation of the undertaking they were about to accept, the voluntary and unnecessary plunge into the kind of battle that he so loathed, but there was something genuine about the spark in his eyes that begged for Hogun's understanding, his approval. The second prince of Asgard was not so opaque as he believed himself to be, sometimes, not to the dark-piercing eyes of a tracker like Hogun.

 

“I couldn't very well have every man, woman and child in the realm charging off to avenge their dead and warn Mogul that we were coming for her, could I,” Loki said, the wry pull of his mouth not quite concealing the uncertainty there. “Your people are... passionate about their vengeance, after all.”

 

“Hurry,” Thor whispered loudly, restlessly shifting the shadows that swirled about him. “The guards will not sleep for long.”

 

Hogun was still staring at Loki. “The Svartálfar's forges will not agree to pay for this.”

 

“Then we'd best be quick and make it count,” Loki said tartly. “I personally intend to see a proper bed in Asgard before the month is out.”

 

“Aye, and a maidenly scrubbing in the baths first,” teased Thor.

 

“And likely a whipping by the All-Father for all of us,” added Sif more frankly, but she was pink-cheeked with anticipation-- the need for Asgard's approval burning in that strange woman warrior, Hogun thought. “Come on or don't, grim Hogun, but let us be off. Mogul awaits our blades.”


	7. Chapter 7

“You have been missed, my princes,” Heimdall announced in his spectral voice, drawing his sword from the Bifröst machine with a shearing _ring_.

 

“And we have missed Asgard,” said Thor. The golden light of the observatory's interior bathed him in a radiant glow, throwing deep, burnished tones into the hair that had grown down past his shoulders during their year on Svartálfaheimr.

 

Had it been but a year, and some small handful of weeks? For when Thor and his brother and their companions stepped out of the observatory, they all found themselves blinking in awe and relief at the glittering universe hanging close and familiar overhead. To Thor's left, Sif sighed in delight; to his right, Fandral was gazing with deep longing across the dark length of the bridge to the warm glow of the city, perfect and still in miniature at such a distance. The air of Asgard tasted like water and stardust, cool and fresh in Thor's mouth, and the deep, steady roar of the Worldfalls filled the air as they stood on the Bifröst and took in the sight of home.

 

He exchanged a glance with Loki, whose eyes were hooded and apprehensive. “Happy to be back, brother?”

 

“Of course,” Loki said, but his smile did not reach his eyes.

 

With a shout of delight, Thor lead the gallop back to Asgard on the horses that Heimdall had arranged to be waiting for them. Fandral's fur-trimmed cape flared in the wind, Sif whooped her own war cry, raven-dark hair streaming out behind her, and even battle-filthy and exhausted they thundered back into Asgard like heroes.

 

Thor already knew that messengers and guards had run ahead of them to tell Odin of their return. Perhaps Heimdall had sent word even earlier, when he had seen the moment of their triumph on Svartálfaheimr. All was one, as far as results mattered: the All-Father's mead hall was full of golden light and a din of voices, and no doubt packed to the rafters.

 

In the antechamber just outside the hall, Fandral fussed with his smoke-singed hair and cape, Sif with the grimy marks on her shield. Hogun alone looked unflappable. Before Thor could end their dithering and stride for the doors to the hall, however, he felt Loki take his elbow in a firm grip and turn him aside.

 

“It was a good fight, no?” said Loki, his eyes gleaming oddly. His drawn and pale face was strangely distant for that of a hero about to return to the adoration of his king and court.

 

“It was,” Thor agreed, for his blood still sang from it, the taste of seiðr and adrenaline sharp in his mouth. He lifted a finger to trace several runes on Loki's forehead, and colour rushed back over Loki's pallid skin, concealing the whiteness of his chapped lips and the translucent purple of his sleep-deprived eyelids.

 

Loki pinched his mouth but nodded slightly, silent thanks for the concession to his vanity. “I want you to claim this victory for yourself.”

 

Thor paused, mouth hanging open, and Loki pushed on.

 

“We'd never have won without you,” he said briskly, brushing off Thor's shoulders and straightening the hang of his cape, and the smile on his face-- it looked so real but it had to be false, for Loki could not _possibly_ be happy to suggest such a thing. “I mean it, brother. Your magic saved us all, and Svartálfaheimr, too. This is truly your day of triumph, and I would have all of Asgard know it.”

 

“And take all credit from you?” demanded Thor, struck dumb.

 

Loki faltered, looking as though he hadn't expected such a reaction.

 

Torn between outrage and incredulity, Thor asked, “How could you suggest I do such a thing?"

 

Sif, Hogun and Fandral were looking over. Loki looked uneasy and attempted a laugh.

 

“Thor, what are you talking about? You slew Mogul and ended the war. The credit is rightfully yours.”

 

“After you lead us through Svartálfaheimr's caves,” Thor protested. “After you rallied our men, and directed our troops, and marched us all up through the mountains fighting every step of the way. _You_ conducted the war--”

 

“As I was ordered to,” Loki tried to interrupt.

 

“And you did it well!” cried Thor. “Had you not decided that we should strike out after Mogul--”

 

“You would have gone anyway.”

 

Unable to stand another word, Thor grabbed Loki's arm roughly. “Brother,” he growled. “ _Enough_. You cannot-- do you truly pity me so much that you would shame me before all of Asgard by giving me credit for your deeds like scraps to a dog?”

 

“They were not all mine!”

 

“Then we will share the triumph as it is due!” Thor yelled. “Loki, how could you think I would ever want to take all that you...”

 

He broke off, struck speechless by the blank, stunned expression on Loki's face. In the ringing silence, Loki's eyes darted from Thor to Sif, Fandral and Hogun, who stared back at him with expressions of similar perplexion.

 

Loki wetted his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Thor,” he said carefully, his hushed voice crackling in this throat, “you are the firstborn son of Odin.” Thor stared at him in bafflement. Seemingly frustrated, Loki went on, “There are certain expectations-- That you conquer. That you emerge victorious above all other victors. Of course we will all have credit for this too, but... surely you can understand how it must be seen that--”

 

“No,” said Thor firmly, leaving Loki with his mouth hanging open. Oftentimes he would humour Loki's complexities and conniptions, but this was not one of those times; he was too tired for anything but bluntness and plain speaking, no matter how Loki would sneer at him for it. “I do not know what this plan of yours is, brother, but I will not have it.”

 

He slung an arm around Loki's shoulders and steered him forcefully to the doors of the mead hall, catching Sif's elbow on the way and drawing her along as well. She drew herself up proudly beside Thor, and Fandral and Hogun fell into place on either end of the line.

 

Still looking shocked and alarmed, Loki opened his mouth.

 

Thor cut him off, saying with a laugh, “Speak to me of it no more, for I smell roast boar such as I have not had in ages, and I see no point in delaying any longer from whatever reward or punishment father has for us. We return as heroes, and Asgard awaits.”

 

Eyes fixed straight ahead, white-faced even beneath the glamour Thor had placed, Loki whispered, “Damn your noble heart,” so softly that Thor nearly missed it below the roar of greeting which rose from the court as the great double doors of the hall swung open before them.

 

In the motion of removing his arm from his brother's shoulders, Thor twitched his hand just so, spreading down another gossamer layer of seiðr to hide the unmanly gloss of tears in Loki's eyes.

 

*

 

Kneeling before the All-Father had always taken a special kind of courage, even when one's honour was wholly intact and there was nothing but praise to be had. Kneeling before the All-Father to confess to one's flagrant delinquency was another matter entirely.

 

The cold stone began to dig into Loki's kneecaps even as the last echoes of Gungnir's thunder were still fading from the now-silent hall.

 

"Thor Odinson," their father pronounced slowly, his voice giving away no hint of his emotions. "Loki Odinson. Lady Sif Sturladóttir. Fandral of Álfheimr. Hogun of Svartálfaheimr.”

 

The line of Fandral's throat bobbed in a nervous swallow. Loki could see the nervous quip itching to break free, choked only by what was probably utter terror.

 

“You come before this court as disobeyers and law-breakers, having defied the express command of the throne of Asgard. Speak for yourselves, if you will.”

 

Thor's voice echoed in Loki's head for but a moment, nowhere near as distressed as it should have been. _Oh, he is_ not _pleased_.

 

Loki shot his brother a savage sideways glare before lifting his face from the tiles at Hliðskjálf's gilded foot to meet Odin's cold stare.

 

“We come before this court repentant of the defiance we have shown to the throne of Asgard,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the mead hall, “but not repentant in the least for those motivations which lead us to disobey. Our actions were undertaken in whole effort for the glory of Asgard, and of our king, that not a single voice in the Nine Realms should be raised to say that Asgard breaks her oaths.”

 

 _Prettily done, brother_ , said Thor's voice, touched with a sense of being reluctantly impressed.

 

 _Shut your mouth or all the silver in the world will not keep my words whole and fine_ , Loki thought back ferociously, on the off chance that Thor could hear it.

 

“And what were these actions that you took, to the end of such a lofty goal?” inquired Odin, his voice aloof and cool.

 

Loki slid his eyes to Hogun, on Thor's other side, and tipped his head just slightly. Without a word, the Dökkálfr took the gold chest that had been placed on the floor by his side and placed it in front of Thor with a chime of metal on stone. Thor blinked in astonishment, having not anticipated being roped into participating in such a way.

 

But Loki would not have all his plans discarded on his fool of a brother's noble impulses.

 

Thick as he was, Thor was still the crown prince of Asgard, and he had walked the halls of the palace for centuries before Loki. He could seize the moment with a few grandiose words as well as anyone. Lifting his head to Odin so that his gold hair glinted in the torchlight, he announced in a bold rumble, “We have slain the vile fiend responsible for orchestrating the destruction of Svartálfaheimr by treachery and dark magics! Thanks to Loki, my brother and our greatest warrior,” he added pointedly, “Mogul of the Mystic Mountain is dead.”

 

The chest was flipped open with a ringing crash and Mogul's severed head lifted aloft by the helmet still secured beneath his chin. Thor's eyes glinted steely blue up at Odin, unblinking and defiant, just _daring_ his father to reject this accomplishment before the entire court.

 

Thor _did_ have an excellent sense of the dramatic, Loki thought approvingly.

 

 _Look here_ , it said, the sight of Asgard's prodigal mage kneeling to announce such a triumph. _It was the work of a seiðmaðr all along, the wickedest of creatures, but Thor has slain him, for all that they were two of a kind. Is Thunderer's seiðr different, then? Has he some kind of honour after all_?

 

“This is the one who raised armies against Svartálfaheimr,” Loki said, his voice measured and confident. Behind him, he could hear the uncomfortable stirring among the old nobles who had counselled the conduct of the war, who had been baffled publicly and at length over the leaderless state of the rogue Dökkálfar. “This is the man who burned cities to ash, and enslaved the mightiest of the Dökkálfar with underhanded witchery. So you see, All-Father-- we could not leave Svartálfaheimr with our honour intact, knowing that this villain remained to wreak further havoc. As warriors and as proud representatives of Asgard, we were bound to seek him out and end him.”

 

“It was Loki who lead us forth,” said Thor, “who counselled us wisely and well through the entire war and to the end of our quest.”

 

“It was Hogun the Grim who found our war through tunnels and mountains that would otherwise have been impassable to even the cleverest Às,” Loki demurred, his voice strong and clear.

 

“It was brave Lady Sif who ensured our conquest of the fortresses which guarded Mogul's stronghold!” Thor roared in turn, all but overflowing with pride in his oldest companion, and lifted the mantle of his broad shoulders to dare anyone to challenge it. “We could not have claimed victory without her strength. And it was Fandral the Dashing who slew the beasts that Mogul ensorcelled to defend his throne room, _his_ sword which pierced the hearts of five mighty cats the likes of which Asgard has never seen!”

 

“And it was Thor who fought Mogul,” Loki finished, so firmly that there would be no equivocation on that point in any re-telling of the story. “Only he was equal to Mogul's seiðr. He matched each blow the tyrant gave, and he held the fortress up around us when Mogul tried to tear it down upon our heads, and he worked the magic which bound and ended Mogul. Without Thor, we would all have been lost.”

 

Odin's single eye glinted, seemingly unmoved. Behind him, however, Frigga's face glowed with mute pride.

 

“We have not come before you empty-handed,” Loki continued. “From the peak of the Mystic Mountain, we bear gifts to glorify the highest names of Asgard, and to make some small repair for our transgressions.”

 

Sif spoke first, as they had agreed. “For Týr,” she announced loudly, thrusting her chin out in challenge as she presented the unsheathed sword wrapped in oilcloth and silk, “Stjarnabitr, a blade whose edge will never know dullness or a foe it cannot pierce.”

 

A rumble went through the court. Looking equal parts delighted, shocked and resentful, Týr came forward-- and, though he hesitated before Sif for several long moments, he eventually accepted the sword, telling every Às present that the god who had been the chiefest opponent of a woman taking up arms now accepted her, however reluctantly, as a warrior worthy to claim war spoils and make tributes. Sif's jaw was set and proud.

 

"For the beautiful Lady Freyja," said Fandral, sweeping a bow even from his kneeling position before revealing his gift with a flourish, "the necklace Brísingamen." To Freyja's flushed face, he winked and added, as cheekily as he could get away with while still kneeling before the All-Father, "May it ever grace the neck of the only thing lovelier than it in all of Asgard-- save of course our beloved Queen, whose wonder goes without saying," he added hastily.

 

Loki and Sif rolled their eyes in unison. With half the court jealous of Freyja and half jealous of Fandral, few would recognise how politically important it was for the once-Vanir goddess to be acknowledged as an esteemed member of the Asgardian court. Odin would not miss it, though.

 

“For Baldr Odinson, the Light of Asgard,” said Hogun in his granite voice, shocking many, including the fresh-scrubbed boy of no more than two centuries who clutched Frigga's gown with wide eyes. “The harp Hársvássrǫdd. Its song will charm the very stones of the earth to sing as well.”

 

His beamish face literally alight with pure joy, Baldr came forward to accept the harp with shy hands. At the mirrored emerald shine that the Dökkálfr's eyes reflected from Baldr's glow, the child prince only broke into a wider smile, delighted further yet.

 

If there ever was a way to endear a foreigner to the hearts of Asgard and its rulers, it was by putting such an expression on the youngest prince's sweet face.

 

Then it was Loki's turn. He felt the lump in his belt pouch which was the ring he had intended to present to Frigga, a gift admittedly stunning in regards to its appearance but only commonplace in its enchantments. He had not intended to shine very brightly next to Thor, after all. But with so much more focus placed on him, now, this gift would not do at all. He had to hope Frigga would not reproach him too much for neglecting her in the ceremony.

 

He took a deep breath, spreading his arms and bowing his head again, the picture of humbleness before his king and father. “For the All-Father,” Loki said, into the hush of the hall, “I give the skin of my back, that he should lay any lashes meant for these brave warriors upon me instead of them, for it was I who gave them orders to disobey, I and no one else who is responsible for their infractions.”

 

In the wake of his pronouncement, there was a silence so profound that the distant thunder of the Worldfalls echoed in the high rafters. The courtiers held their tongues utterly, straining as one to hear how Odin would finally reply.

 

By Loki's side, Thor had bowed his head again as well, and Sif, Hogun and Fandral had followed suit. Eyes lowered to the floor as he trembled with tension, all Loki could see were the tiles-- and then one of Odin's boots as he stepped forward, and then another.

 

A hand landed on the shoulder of both Loki and Thor, venerable fingers gripping tightly as Odin stood before them and faced out over the hall with his sons in hand. At the level of Odin's belt, Loki and Thor dared to exchange a glance. Thor's eyes were very wide, darting more than once to the hand on his shoulder in disbelief.

 

“It is not the prerogative of a warrior to command himself or others,” Odin said. “And it is not the place of a son to defy his father.”

 

Loki swallowed hard.

 

“But,” Odin continued, and-- did his voice soften?-- “it is very much the responsibility and the _duty_ of a prince, who will one day be a king, to choose the actions which are _right_ \-- right for all people and all realms, regardless of personal consequences or desires. There will be no skin taken, for on this day, I have two sons-- and three warriors-- who chose such actions.”

 

Odin's fingers tightened on their shoulders. “Rise, my sons,” he said softly. “Thor. Loki. Asgard honours you both.”


	8. Chapter 8

Afterwards, it seemed to Loki that the cheering and feasting and speeches went on at double speed, everything around him blurred in a haze of vague unreality. He caught sight of the same look of faint astonishment on Sif's face when she met his eyes for a moment in the midst of telling her tale to the group of warriors ringed eagerly around, and in Thor's voice as he accepted lavish congratulations from some of the highest-ranking nobles in the hall. Loki would have to tell Thor that those words were nowhere near as sincere as they seemed, but-- later.

 

“Loki,” said Frigga's voice, and he turned to see her approaching.

 

“Mother,” he greeted, familiarly and a touch shakily, but too glad of everything to hold himself in the state of cold repose he was known for.

 

Sensing such, she gave him her hand to kiss, and then embraced him as she had not done in public for centuries. “I am so proud of you,” Frigga whispered in his ear. “Your father and I both are.”

 

Loki squeezed the hand he was still holding. Turning it over, he placed in Frigga's palm the ring he had brought for her. “I meant to present it to your earlier,” he confided, trying to drown out the suspicious waver in his voice with a jesting tone, “but Thor is forever disrupting my plans.”

 

“It is wonderful,” Frigga said, turning it over in her fingers. Without warning, she gave a small laugh. “Your brother told you to pick it for me.”

 

Suddenly uncertain, Loki said, “Yes. Why, what is it?”

 

Frigga smiled serenely. “A clever bit of enchantment that I imagine he didn't tell you about. Nothing to concern yourself over.”

 

Loki's brow knit but his wry smile remained. “As I said,” he muttered dryly, “forever disrupting my plans.”

 

After Odin's speech, they had had a chance to slip into an antechamber just outside of the hall and sponge off the worst of the grime on their faces; servants had relieved them of their weapons and brought fresh tunics and capes. Beneath the clean linen, however, Loki's skin was as sweat-sticky and dirty as ever, and he knew that the oil he had dabbed behind his ears didn't entirely conceal the stink of it. (Thor, who had snorted at the fragrance as effeminate, had ended up instead with a large splash of it across his pants because Loki refused to permit his brother's ripeness back into the hall, not that most of the court warriors would have cared.)

 

It seemed the feast would never end. Loki spoke with lords and courtiers, and with the warriors who had served under him on Svartálfaheimr. Once the earlier giddiness of success wore off, however, all Loki could think of was the clamminess of his skin and the itch of his filthy scalp. The duties of a politician did not slip onto his shoulders easily. He wanted a bath and clean sheets and _quiet_ , damn them all. By the time midnight came, he was almost prepared to announce it to the entire hall. Only the knowledge that Odin was watching him, looking on with _pride_ , was enough to still his tongue.

 

Out of the corner of his eye, Loki caught sight of Hogun headed determinedly in his direction. Grateful, he detached himself from the minor noble who had been trying to discuss tithe distribution with him and strode to meet Hogun.

 

“Thor has need of your counsel,” the Dökkálfr informed him in a low, hard voice.

 

Loki's relieved smile faded. One short nod from Hogun was all he needed to confirm the disbelieving question that had crawled across Loki's face.

 

He strode quickly in the direction Hogun had pointed, making sure to keep his pasted-on smile bright, nodding to the people who greeted him but moving briskly so that he could not be engaged in conversation. Thor, where was--

 

Thor was seated at a table of warriors, smiling widely and talking with great, animated gestures. The shards of shattered pottery on the floor all around them suggested that they had all been drinking together earlier, but now the warriors were facing Thor with dark expressions, clearly struggling to remain calm as he talked blithely on. No, Loki realised, as he approached-- not blithely. The mean curl to Thor's mouth said that he knew exactly how insulting he was being.

 

“Thor!” Loki said loudly, dropping his hand on Thor's shoulder and cutting him off in the middle of a joke that would have ended very, very badly. He grinned down at Thor in what was ostensibly happiness, though the anger simmering in his veins made him feel more like baring his teeth. “Good to see everyone's been having a wonderful time.”

 

It looked like it hurt the warrior across from Thor to nod in mute agreement, unwilling to contradict Loki.

 

Still smiling, Loki continued apologetically, “Gentlemen, excuse me, but I'm afraid I have to steal my brother away. We're needed elsewhere at the moment.”

 

The warriors muttered their assent. Loki's fingers dug into Thor's shoulder like pincers as he hauled Thor upright.

 

“Loki, what--”

 

“Come on, brother,” Loki interrupted loudly, in a voice as jovial as he could make it. “I hate to drag you away from such good company, but you know how it is.”

 

Thor's countenance darkened with something approaching fury as Loki ushered him quickly away by the crook of his arm, offering no chance to resist. Smiling so hard that he felt like surely everyone could see the strained, lunatic edge to it, Loki whisked Thor from the hall as fast as he could, ducking around a set of pillars and then through the servants' passageway behind the tapestry hung there.

 

“What are you doing?” demanded Thor in outrage. He tried to wrench his arm free, his scowl only deepening when he found that Loki would not release him. “Loki, what is this?”

 

“I could ask you the same thing,” uttered Loki harshly, the smile dropping from his face in an instant.

 

Thor's breathing was deep and unsteady, his face reddening quickly. “I am not the one dragging you from the feast without so much as a--”

 

In the dimness of the narrow hallway, a servant carrying a platter of fresh meats from the kitchen yelped as she came around a curve in the passageway and nearly ran into them.

 

“Get,” Loki barked, in no mood for patience. She squeezed past them, babbling apologies, and fled. He clamped his fingers down tighter as Thor's bony wrist flexed and twisted in his grasp. “ _Thor_ \--”

 

“Release me,” Thor growled. Unable to break the grip which wielded Mjölnir, he used the few scant inches of height he had on Loki to shove Loki back against the wall with a clatter of chain mail.

 

“Unbelievable,” Loki hissed, teeth bared. “After _everything_ I've done for you tonight--”

 

Behind them, another servant squeaked in surprise. Losing patience, Thor made a single sharp gesture with his free hand. The world dissolved into bronze-orange light before Loki's protest could leave his lips.

 

Loki staggered at the landing on a plush carpet, in a room that smelled like bitter herbs and smoke. Thor's darkened chambers, he realised, lit only by the dull glow of the banked hearth. Thor had materialised across the room and stood there heaving with foul-tempered breath, looking seconds from jumping for Loki's throat.

 

Their isolation finally freed Loki's tongue. “By Ymir's shattered bones, what is _wrong_ with you?” he yelled, the full force of his fury breaking out. Frustratingly, his voice had gone high and shrill with emotion, as it was wont to do, but embarrassment only brought a touch more heat to his already flushed face.

 

“I did nothing!” Thor roared back.

 

“Nothing!” It came out a harsh scoff. So furious that he could hardly _think_ straight, Loki balled his hands into trembling fists. To his utter humiliation, his eyes began to sting-- grief, rage, betrayal, it didn't matter; his eyes would try to weep and nothing he had done over the years had been able to entirely get rid of such a weakness. “I handed you Asgard on a _plate_ , I practically gift-wrapped glory and honour for you, and _this_ is how you act not four hours after returning as a conquering hero? Picking petty fights and insulting the warriors who risked their lives for Asgard? You aren't fit to lead a hunt, let alone a realm!”

 

Shock and hurt splashed across Thor's face, cutting his rage wide open to the soft core beneath, the place he had armoured against all but his brother. His mouth worked silently for a moment, as if he were unable to process what Loki had just said.

 

“I-- I did not--”

 

“You weren't about to call Egill a coward and a fool?” Loki snapped. “You didn't mean to bring up the way Sveinn dropped his sword and almost fled battle on Svartálfaheimr? Do the consequences of your actions never cross your mind, Thor?”

 

The wounded disbelief in Thor's eyes lasted for a heartbeat longer before it suddenly cleared, replaced by comprehension and then, swiftly, utter astonishment. To Loki's surprise, Thor let out a great, barking  'ha!' of laughter, sharp and acrid as smoke.

 

“Oh, surely not,” he said, looking caught between shock and delight. “Do you mean to say that you--? Ha!”

 

“This isn't funny.”

 

“Nay, brother, it is!” Thor countered with some kind of perverse delight. There was cruel mockery in his voice, now. “All this time, I thought you were content to turn a blind eye and leave me to my proclivities, provided I kept them quiet enough not to shame you. But you-- you truly had _no idea_.”

 

“About _what_?”

 

The light in Thor's eyes was now enough to make Loki's hands flex nervously, a dark and hungry expression that set the hair on the back of Loki's neck prickling with warning. Fresh sweat broke out along the curve of his spine, sending a chill up his back.

 

Thor's hands worked in mid-air for a moment, parting the veil with a ripple and drawing out something from beyond it. His mouth was twisted in a hard, tight shape, something close to sneering but raw, too close to self-deprecation for comfort.

 

Loki's breath caught in his throat at the sight of the object which lay in Thor's palms. He stretched out a hand for it without thinking, mutely asking. Thor gripped it more tightly for a moment, big hands flexing with ill-concealed tension, but then he stepped forward and handed it over, eyes still full of that low, hot _wanting_.

 

It was a crop, far too heavy for riding and much too short to be a proper whip, made of braided leather with a worn wooden handle that sat easily in Loki's palm. Even without having swung the crop once, Loki could tell that the well-oiled leather was thick enough to leave deep, blooming bruises rather than score the skin, and that its weight brooked no usage but serious.

  
“And so you anger the warriors,” Loki said quietly, comprehending. And yet-- how? Why?

 

Thor's smile was triumphant and bitter at the same time. “When a man has a new grudge against me, he asks no questions as to why I would put a lash in his hands and tell him to use it. He just _does_ \-- and he uses it for too long, and doesn't stop, and strikes where he shouldn't.”

 

But the glitter in Thor's eyes said these were far from terrible things. Loki wondered if Thor knew what his face looked like.

 

“Even tonight, Thor?” Loki demanded, lifting his eyes from the crop. His mouth felt very dry. “If you had the sense to never pick each man more than once, they might all have kept their mouths shut about being asked to-- to _beat_ the crown prince and actually doing it. I imagine more than one of them left your bed wondering what had just _happened_. But now that you're suddenly more than the prodigal seiðmaðr? Thor, the gossip would tear you apart.”

 

“Idle talk,” Thor dismissed.

 

“Your kingship is built on talk!” snapped Loki. “And I would know, for am I not its architect, much as you try to rip down what I build up?”

 

“You're angry with me,” Thor said.

 

“Of course I'm--”

 

Loki stopped dead, staring at his brother. Now that he looked, _looked_ , he could see that Thor was wretched with need, all his tension and derision and crackling anger twisted up at the centre of a mess that was starting to fall apart, piece by shaking piece. Almost without his brain's permission, Loki flexed the leather of the crop between his hands, testing its weight and hang, and watched the way Thor's shadowed eyes followed the motion.

 

“Has it been very long, brother?” he asked in a dry whisper.

 

Thor shuddered. “Ages,” he said with raw feeling. “I hadn't the time for a single partner on Svartálfaheimr.”

 

“Of course,” agreed Loki, hearing his own voice as if from a distance. “You must have missed it.”

 

He couldn't imagine what Thor found appealing about being hit. The wave of longing that crossed Thor's guileless face registered as a foreign emotion, utterly inconceivable, and yet-- there it was, coming from Thor, who could not lie to save his life.

 

Loki ought to know what to do with this information. He ought to know how to use it, how to react properly. He could think of _nothing_ \-- nothing beyond the creeping horror of the thought that somehow Loki had been too distracted over the years, too blind to see that Thor had been broken enough to seek acceptance by letting his enemies beat him.

 

It could not be. Not Thor, not his brother-- Thor, who had always been strong enough to shoulder the burden of every scorn and still laugh about it; Thor, who was so pig-headed when he had made up his mind that it drove Loki to insanity, and whose self-same constancy Loki trusted enough to have built the castle of his loyalty on it.

 

His voice oddly choked, Loki said, “Just tell me why.”

 

“Loki, I--”

 

Loki's lips lifted in a snarl, the leather creaking in his clenching fists. “Tell me. _Why_.”

 

“I don't know,” Thor admitted, his broad, bony shoulders sinking down upon themselves. “But nothing I do, no feasting or trickery is enough to wear out the feeling that gets into my blood. It is enough to drive me mad with distraction, and then I drive others mad because of it, because I cannot _think_ , I cannot sleep, I cannot-- _walk_ through the palace without feeling that every wall is pressing in on me!”

 

Thor's lips lifted in a slight smirk in an attempt to lighten the mood. “You know how I get, Loki.”

 

Loki said nothing.

 

“And--” Visibly searching for the words, Thor faltered. Colour flushed over his cheeks, accompanied by the belated anger of embarrassment. “Enough of this. I will not--”

 

“Finish,” Loki ordered with deathly quiet, and in his head the words that he thought frantically but did not say were, _or I will rip your eyes from your head and hide them where you'll never find them, and you'll have no use for your spell books and no defence from your enemies, and I'll keep you in my chambers and guard you and mind you and see to it that you never leave again_.

 

“Loki, it-- I cannot stand the feeling. I go through day upon day without ever being touched by anything. Nobody lays a hand on me. I have no sparring partners, no lovers-- and Sif and Fandral are hardly the type for manly wrestling. Nothing-- nothing can convince me that I am real again until I know it in my bones.”

 

“In your bruises, you mean.”

 

“'Tis all the same to me, brother.”

 

As if from a distance, Loki could feel himself shaking. Thor stood at the centre of his vision, unrepentant, his eyes full of hope and the shadowed anticipation of rejection. The leather of the crop was warm against Loki's hands.

 

If Thor wanted bruises, then he would get them.

 

“Take off your shirt and kneel,” Loki heard himself say coldly.

 

Thor hesitated for only the moment it took him to process what Loki had said. Then, his entire face breaking wide open with relief, he was scrambling for the fastenings of his robes. The tiny buttons of his dark robes sprang open with a twitching of his fingers, more than one popping off and clattering to the floor. The robes sank in a dark puddle to the floor, swiftly followed by the high-collared tunic and fitted shirt. Still in the middle of removing his last garment, Thor was already moving towards Loki, sinking to his knees in mid-stride and reaching out.

 

Thor's hand closed on Loki's knee, his rare and dazzling grin cutting the darkness. “Brother--”

 

Loki planted a boot against Thor's shoulder and shoved him away. “If you want me to stay, Thor, you had best keep your mouth shut. It's not as if I plan to listen to anything you tell me.”

 

On his hands and knees on the stone floor, Thor appeared gob-smacked for a moment, and then his eyes narrowed, filling with heat and barely contained hunger. The dark, savage thing looking up at Loki, all long angles and lean muscle tight over his bones-- that was the brother he knew how to hurt.

 

Slinking like a great cat, Thor rose to his feet and crossed the room, kicking off his boots on the way. His bed was in an adjoining chamber, but he did not head for that door. Instead, he went over to the wide, low daybed in front of the tall glass doors that opened to the balcony. Telegraphing his tension from the set of his shoulders, Thor nonetheless knelt against the edge of the bed with his back to Loki, stretching out his arms across the mattress and laying down his torso with a confidence, a kind of ready anticipation that screamed to Loki of depravity.

 

 _How can that be_ , muttered his mind, nearly frantic with the shock of everything, _how can this be obscene? Thor has taunted men with near nudity and made a banality of lewd gestures before the entire court. He is not even asking for sexual contact, how can this be obscene_?

 

Loki moved without engaging in any of the thoughts that were streaming through his head. Without thinking, without feeling anything but the raw, wordless scream of injustice that shrieked through him, he drew back the crop and brought it down on Thor's back without warning-- twice, three times--

 

Thor jerked and cursed, his voice full of anger, but remained in place-- and it spoke volumes, for he could have tossed Loki through a wall with but a twist of his hand if he had wanted to.

 

Thor wanted this. He enjoyed pain. No-- he _needed_ it. The contact, the bruises, the battered bones and the dull hot ache of healing flesh, the torments that had made Loki miserable day in and day out for centuries-- Thor wanted them so badly that he prostrated himself before common soldiers to get a tenth of the beatings Loki had endured and loathed since childhood. Thor _begged_ for what Loki would have given anything to escape.

 

Had Thor taken Loki's lot in life, he would probably never have known of his taste for the lash. He would have flourished beneath the daily assault of training and shoving and casual punches, each congratulatory back-slap and jostle working to satiate his deep-rooted appetite for the physicality of battle.

 

Thor was a war-god like Odin, the blood-father Loki had no claim to, whose mantle Loki had tried to emulate without the blood and instincts that would make him love it as Thor did-- stupid, how _stupid_ of Loki, how useless for him to have spent so many years trying and failing to be something that Thor was without even meaning to be…

 

Full up of a betrayed fury he couldn't comprehend, Loki brought the crop down without mercy or pause, slashing across Thor's shoulders and back with artless brutality. His eyes were wet again, hot and full of sparks; he could hear his breath hissing through his teeth rapidly. It wasn't-- it wasn't--

 

His back covered in red welts, Thor arched into the blows in a combination of agony and rapture, and there was no mistaking the harsh delight in his moan.

 

\-- _fair_.

 

“You like this, do you,” said Loki uncontrollably, the words tearing themselves from his mouth like knives. “Say it.”

 

“Loki--”

 

“Say it, damn you!”

 

Thor let out a yelp at the stray blow that cut across the nape of his neck, flinching so hard that he nearly sat up. “Aye, I like it,” he rasped, bowing back over the mattress again.

 

An ache began to blossom in Loki's shoulder as he continued to hail lashes down on Thor's back. The initial lines of pink were deepened into a full red burn, the scarcity of unmarked skin left speaking to the savagery at which Loki had begun. For a moment, Loki faltered, suddenly seeing that what he had already done would continue to pain Thor for the rest of the night even if Loki stopped then and there.

 

And then, his arm hesitating in the arc of the next swing, Loki saw the jerk that ran through Thor's body, unprompted by a blow, as he twitched his hips against the edge of the mattress.

 

“If you stop, I will break your fingers,” Thor growled, erasing any trace of doubt in Loki's mind.

 

To prevent Thor from thinking his hesitation had been any sort of queasiness or mercy, Loki cracked the crop hard against the meat between Thor's shoulder blades, which bunched and quivered in agonised reaction. A cry of pain broke from Thor's mouth, one of the first.

 

He was going to make Thor cry for this, Loki vowed. And he was going to enjoy it.

 

“Don't kid yourself, Thor. I'll do what I want to you. If you wish, you may tell me to stop, but do that--” He paused for the breath to deliver an especially sharp set of strokes-- “--and we're done.”

 

Thor's face was pressed into the mattress, red and pinched with pain, his long hair matted to the sweat on his forehead and cheeks. His hips had begun to rock against the bed of their own accord, a short and jerky rhythm that drove  gasps from his mouth.

 

Thor wouldn't tell Loki to stop, not even if it killed him. Not with his pride. A hot spark of anger lit in Loki's chest at the thought of Thor taking a lash from anyone else, from men who wouldn't know that they alone were responsible for Thor's well-being, who might not heed Thor's words even if by some miracle he _did_ say them. Fool. _Idiot_ of a brother.

 

“Tell me, brother,” Loki said, over the steady sound of the crop striking Thor's skin and the choked little grunts Thor made at every blow, noises partway between a moan and a whimper. “When exactly did you discover this taste of yours?”

 

“Svartálfaheimr,” Thor said hoarsely, his voice shaking as badly as the hands that he clawed the daybed's sheets with. Loki blinked at the reply, momentarily surprised, before the answer slid into place in his head. Thor confirmed it a moment later, muttering in a voice throaty with humiliation, “in Brokkr's forge. They-- _ah_!-- they bound me-- in the forge. Over an ah-- _anvil_. They couldn't take my head-- they couldn't take my head so they beat me, and I…”

 

“That must have been _humiliating_ ,” murmured Loki, low and intent as a knife.

 

Thor's face tightened in pain, real or remembered, but by then his whole body was moving against the bed, shuddering and arching into the crop as he shoved his hips against the edge of the mattress. “They didn't see,” he gasped. “And it went away fast enough when-- _aghh_!-- when they sewed my m-mouth.”

 

The scars on Thor's lips gleamed in the darkness, pearly white and wet with the sheen of sweat that covered his whole face. Fascinated, Loki watched the desperate stretch and pant of Thor's mouth, which was as wide open as his eyes were tightly shut while he writhed beneath the lash. The trickster's noises were taking on a desperate tone, his hips grinding urgently.

 

It had to be chafing, Loki thought, caught between amazement and disdain. It had to hurt, the rough rub of Thor's length against his smallclothes and the ties of his breeches. But not enough to dissuade Thor from scraping out his harsh and bitten pleasure as Loki drove him berserk with the crop, no.

 

Impetuous Thor, selfish Thor-- of course a little rawness wouldn't keep him from something he wanted so badly, of course not. He didn't care what he had risked in order to get his pleasure from the soldiers, or what he looked like as he rutted against the bed. He was crying out regularly now as Loki's crop fell ruthlessly across welted skin, long choking noises that were kept from being sobs only by the edge of angry growl that Thor still clung to. That anger was echoed in the frustrated heave of his shoulders when Loki struck too close to a crimson-edged mark that had already been overlaid several times. Thor's eyelashes clung in wet triangles, his eyes red-rimmed but clamped shut too tightly to leak yet.

 

Had he let them see this? Loki wondered, driven by a renewed surge of fury. Was this what Thor had given to the warriors he had asked to beat him?

 

“You--” Loki's throat choked and his mouth worked silently against the force of the rage churning inside him. “You stupid-- self-centred-- imbecile, how _dare_ you. This is what you do-- with the name of Odin? _This_ \-- is what--”

 

With a broken yell, Thor surged hard against the mattress and then collapsed, every fibre of his body quivering in the aftermath of his climax. His hips continued to judder and twitch for several moments, echoing the spastic flutter of his eyelids.

 

Boneless and utterly spent, he lay stretched across the daybed even as Loki continued to bring the crop down. His exhausted body absorbed the blows with barely a twitch. By the dazed look in Thor's half-open eyes, Loki wondered if Thor could feel anything above the haze of heat and pain that saturated his being.

 

Thor's mind-- it was as far away as it had ever been on those days when he had lain on the grass beneath the yew trees of the palace gardens at Loki's side, staring up at the sky with a half-eaten apple forgotten in one hand and his lips moving soundlessly through fragmented incantations.

 

The crop finally fell falteringly to Loki's side. It was only then that he realised he was panting heavily, shaking even harder than Thor was. Unable to swallow back the sudden lump in his throat, he stared down at his brother and tried to breathe.

 

Thor's long gold hair clung wetly to his sweat-sleek shoulders. Given that his bone structure had always been broad by nature, the effect of Thor's sinewy leanness was disconcerting, and left him looking always slightly disproportionate. Now naked from the waist up, his shoulder blades and the ladder of his spine pressed through his welted skin, and the lean muscles strapped over his ribs strained with the force of his wheezing breath. His entire back glowed red, with shadows of rich bruise-purple already darkening beneath the surface in some places.

 

There was no mistaking the soft, satisfied moan in Thor's respiration.

 

(-- _so many years trying and failing to be something that Thor was without even meaning to be_ \--)

 

Loki's knees folded from beneath him. The tears that he had been holding back for centuries welled up and finally spilled over. He reached out blindly, found Thor's shoulder and pressed himself up against Thor's bruise-hot back, burying his face against Thor's shoulder and ignoring the flinch and hiss it earned him.

 

Clinging to Thor like an anchor, he wept bitterness and injustice, rage and mourning, the grief for everything he had suffered, the fury that Thor had suffered none of it, the hopelessness of knowing that what could have been was _not_. He wept the weight he had been carrying for the year on Svartálfaheimr, ground down by the daily wretchedness of battle. He did not even know why he wept save that he _needed_ to, and, as much as he loathed that need, it would not be denied.

 

Still adrift in the haze of adrenaline and heat-heavy blood, Thor lay very still beneath Loki, hardly able to do anything more than breathe and tremble. By the time Loki’s tears had trailed off into nothingness, though, Thor had returned to himself enough to feel exhaustion creeping over him.

 

He moved clumsily, shifting out from under Loki and twisting around to wrap an arm over Loki’s shoulders.

 

“Come, brother,” he muttered.

 

With a stifled groan of pain, Thor dragged himself and Loki onto the daybed in one clumsy heave. Loki grunted in surprise, falling halfway on top of Thor. No more coherent than wordless mutters of discomfort, the two of them rolled over each other in an attempt to sort out their exhausted limbs, finally settling side by side on the mattress with their legs still entangled.

 

Still breathing shakily, Loki kicked off his boots, too exhausted to relieve himself of anything else. How Thor managed to push out of his trousers and stained smallclothes, Loki didn't know (though he suspected seiðr and was distantly irritated the same courtesy hadn't been extended to him), but Thor ended up naked and wrapped halfway around Loki, his grip deeply and very casually possessive. Still trembling from head to foot with exertion, Thor pushed his face clumsily against Loki's chest, mouthing something that emerged as no more than a satisfied, snuffling breath.

 

Somehow, Loki found that the idea of being handled and owned like an object didn't disturb him. Staring up at the ceiling in the darkness, he trailed his callused fingertips over the hot, abused skin of Thor's back. It drew a twitch and grunt but little else, as the slackness in Thor's body bespoke the way he was already hovering on the edge of deep sleep.

 

Thor muttered something beneath his breath that could have been a spell or a somnolent order for Loki to stop thinking already. Either way, Loki soon found his eyelids dropping, and slid into slumber to the sound of Thor's faint snores.


	9. Chapter 9

Loki woke with a twitch and a grunt, bright morning light shining on his eyelids. He could hear movement nearby: Thor's footsteps, breathing and actions, his presence as unabashedly conspicuous as ever. Loki cracked his eyes open and winced immediately. He ached where his armour had caused him to sleep awkwardly, and he could feel the grime and body oil on every inch of skin beneath his clothing.

 

Thor was standing in front of the tall glass doors to the balcony, arms above his head as he stretched. His back-- Loki's eyes widened-- his back was bruised in a way that would normally have had Loki reaching for Mjölnir in retribution against whomever had managed to damage Thor so (once, it had happened but once-- and never again).

 

Thor moved as though it pained him to do so, of _course_ he did, but when he turned around to see Loki awake and staring, his grin was wide and brilliant.

 

“Good morn, brother!”

 

Loki shut his eyes against the glare of the sun. “Yes,” he said gruffly, rolling onto his back and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Good morning, Thor.”

 

“Up you get,” Thor said too loudly, clapping a hand on Loki's shoulder.

 

The baths would be empty at that time of day, Loki thought. Judging from the light outside, he and Thor were incredibly late to break the morning fast. Frigga wouldn't be pleased-- nor Odin, after their sudden disappearance from the feast last night.

 

“The day is wasting, Loki! Rise and be glad, we're home!”

 

“Thor, please, a _moment_ ,” Loki muttered, grated by Thor's irrepressible cheer. Could he not be allowed to celebrate their return to Asgard with a long and grateful bath? Did his silence make his joy any less real than Thor's?

 

\--well, according to much of Asgard, yes. They truly thought him a man of few and muted emotions, save for his temper.

 

“You only prolong your own suffering,” Thor told him.

 

“All right!” Loki snapped, hauling himself upright. A dozen sharp pulls of pain told him where his muscles had knotted overnight, and he dreaded the long walk to the bathing pools. “Does this--”

 

There was a deep pool full of steaming hot water sunk into the marble floor of Thor's room. It certainly had never been there before. There was a grainy opaqueness to the water that suggested bath salts had been added, and Loki's own grooming kit sat on the floor next to a tray of soaps and oils.

 

“Thor,” he said, intending it to be a rebuke for stealing Loki's belongings, for using seiðr on the palace architecture (and hadn't Thor learned that lesson about altering load-bearing columns?), but it came out far too soft and shocked for comfort.

 

“It wasn't hard to think of what my finicky brother would want most,” Thor said, looking entirely too pleased with himself. “The number of times you demanded that I use cleaning spells on you on Svartálfaheimr, I might have thought you were a lady.”

 

“Sif made no such requests.”

 

“Sif wouldn't thank you to suggest that she's a lady.”

 

Loki got to his feet, drawn by the heat of the water. His chest was clutching, though, sharp and sweet, and so what emerged next was an acerbic, “Thor, really. I could as easily have used the palace baths.”

 

“Ah, but then you wouldn't have me in your bath.”

 

“Do I want you in my bath?”

 

“Unless you mean to wash yourself.”

 

“As if I haven't hands of my own,” said Loki drily.

 

But Thor laughed, waving a hand at him. Seiðr rippled over Loki's skin like cool silk. He felt his clothing loosen around him as buckles slithered undone and buttons slipped silently open. What could fall off, did, and Loki glared at Thor for the clatter of his shin guards and wrist bracers on the floor. Nonetheless, he stripped off the rest and dropped it, for once not bothering to shake out his clothing neatly. In fact, he entertained a brief thought of burning it and all the dust of Svartálfaheimr along with it.

 

Loki hissed as he slipped one foot into the pool, nearly driven to bliss by the heat. Thor, of course, strode right past him and straight into the water with a _crash_ , sending a wave of water slopping over the edges of the pool and across the floor.

 

Flinging back his sodden hair, he grinned up at Loki.

 

“I promise it won't turn you green,” he teased.

 

“That was hardly my concern,” Loki said tartly, though it had of course occurred to him. “Honestly, Thor. If you plan to do this, do it right.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Loki gestured with one hand. “Take the cloth.”

 

Thor took it as Loki sat down on the edge of the pool, his feet and calves in the water. Eyes cool and guarded, Loki extended one foot to Thor, who held the soap and cloth in opposite hands.

 

“And don't just _scrub_ ,” he ordered, knowing he sounded womanish and prim but unable to hold back the admonition, for Thor surely would have curried him like a horse if Loki hadn't instructed otherwise.

 

Thor grinned again, rolling his eyes, but he took Loki's ankle in the hand that held the cloth and held it still as he ran the soap up and down the line of Loki's shin, making a production of his gentleness. A froth of greyish bubbles slid down Loki's leg and over Thor's fingers. Loki could not help but shut his eyes in pleasure at the welcome scrape of the sand embedded in the soap. He had _dreamed_ of this, all those mornings he had spent splashing his face and neck with cold calciferous runoff from the pools in Svartálfaheimr's caverns.

 

Thor's hands moved up to his left knee, then started again at the ankle of the other leg, washing with long, firm strokes of his hands.

 

Startled to find himself breathing a little oddly, Loki put his feet on the underwater bench ledge and stood up when Thor had finished with his calves. Eyes closed, face a deliberate mask of serenity, he held still and tried not to shiver when Thor used the soap dish to scoop hot water and pour it down Loki's hips and thighs.

 

The silence Thor kept as he washed the fronts and outsides of Loki's thighs was vast and telling. The thunder god’s breath was louder than usual in the echoing quiet of the room, otherwise broken only by the splash of water and the wet _schff_ of the cloth wiping down Loki's skin.

 

Loki jumped when Thor's hand suddenly slid up the back of one thigh, his fingers warm and powerful beneath the rough lick of the wash cloth. Thor put a hand on his opposite hip as if to calm Loki like a nervous horse.

 

“You haven't put soap there,” Loki said. The slight break in his voice was audible only to the most familiar ear-- and Thor, Thor was the one who knew him best, but he didn't seem to notice, for he only gave a thick noise and slid the bar of soap up in a perfunctory swipe.

 

The soap moved up the backs of his thighs in quick circles, its combination of scraping and slippery across the sensitive skin lighting tremors along Loki's nerves. Then Thor's wrist turned with an abrupt jerk, knuckles pushing against the soft flesh of Loki's inner thigh as hand and soap slid between his legs from behind.

 

Down. It took Loki a long, breathless moment to realise Thor was working his way back down to Loki's knees.

 

Why had he decided this would be a good idea, again?

 

The torment of the cloth followed, ten times worse than the soap had been. With only the thin weave of the cloth to separate them, Thor's strong fingers pressed into the muscle of Loki's thigh like brands. The unflinching slide of his fingers along the crease of tender skin just below Loki's buttocks was-- was--

 

Thor, Loki thought, rather lightheadedly, could have no idea what he was doing. Surely not. He hadn't the subtlety or patience to torment like this rather than slinging Loki over his shoulder and tossing him down.

 

Not that-- not that they'd ever... Though it wasn't unheard of-- siblings, that was, not princes-- for after all, who knew better than a brother?

 

 _Ah_ , ah, oh gods, Thor was touching his stones, cupping and rolling them in a soap-slippery palm as openly as if he had a right to every part of Loki's body, _ah_ , and the cloth was _gone_ \--

 

And then an audacious finger slid between Loki's buttocks, pushing back and then right against the tight muscle of his entrance--

 

The rush of eager heat blindsided Loki. A split second later it was followed by rage-- at Thor's presumption, at the intensity of his own reaction. Before Loki knew it, he had cracked his knee twice into Thor's head, one hand fisted in Thor's wet hair to hold him in place for a third blow, only to be jolted to a halt by the fist Thor had around that leg just below the knee.

 

Standing on one leg, Loki did his best not to wobble as he turned seething eyes down to Thor.

 

“If you _ever_ dare--”

 

“Of course, brother,” Thor said, and his expression had gone sullen and dark, the look of a boy whose grand and very public trick had fallen apart on him, leaving him exposed, angry and humiliated. “I am the only seiðmaðr in this family. Of course you aren't ergi.”

 

Thoroughly derailed by that one word, Loki caught his breath for a different reason. “Who said that of you?”

 

“All of Asgard says it. I'm not stupid.”

 

“I expected more of your intelligence than to believe it,” said Loki sharply. “It's incredibly outdated.”

 

Thor's mouth curled upwards. “The practice?”

 

“The _word_.”

 

“But you don't want--”

 

Loki's mouth thinned. “No.”

 

Lie. Liar, Thor should have said. Liar and hypocrite.

 

Aye, the concept was outdated and slowly moving farther out of society, but the Æsir had long lives. The oldest among them, who remembered ergi in its most shaming and virulent form, were also the stubbornest and most unchanging, and still had loud voices in the court-- some of the loudest, even, as age was owed respect for the trappings of glory and accomplishment that accompanied it. They would not be moved by the disagreement of princes and young warriors who wished to be freer with their closest companions. Far easier for the voice of long tradition to break fledgling nonconformity against its sword.

 

And Loki dared not challenge that sword, for even Mjölnir was not mighty enough to best it. Not now, not with his own personal status and thus Thor's kingship on the line. Loki fought his battles by planning and waiting... and, now, by lying to his brother.

 

With tension trembling between them, Loki let go of Thor's hair and Thor released his knee. Even doing his best to relax again, Loki drew a shuddering breath when the cloth stroked up his leg again, rough in Thor's grip.

 

Thor pushed himself farther back in the pool, gesturing. Loki stepped off the bench and stood still for Thor to take the soap to his stomach, now submerged to just under his navel in the hot water. The way his skin tingled with pleasure at the heat helped to soothe his nerves again.

 

Eyes closed. Face blank. Calm.

 

Rather than moving behind Loki to wash his back, Thor stood before him. He reached his long arms around Loki and pulled him against his chest to scrub the soap across Loki's shoulders and back, close like a hug. Nostrils flaring in annoyance, Loki held his tongue.

 

Without subtlety and with hardly a pretence of washing him, Thor plunged his hands below the water and squeezed the meat of Loki's buttocks, pushing and kneading roughly through the sudsy washcloth. Loki said nothing, gave no sign that he had noticed, though he was well aware that he was being goaded.

 

Thor wanted to play that game, did he? Then he would be taught again that Loki had far more patience with being taunted than Thor.

 

(And if, under guise of long-suffering duress, he let himself relax into the touch that sent electricity crackling up his spine, if he saved up and seared every moment of sensation into his brain forever--

 

\--well. Who had to know?)

 

Thor's hands moved big, kneading circles over Loki's back as he scrubbed the soap around, pushing and digging into the muscles that had been knotted for weeks. Pressed as he was against Thor's chest, Loki found that his affected nonchalance soon became true relaxation as the warmth and rhythm of it washed over him. Thus, he blinked and flinched momentarily when Thor made to push him back.

 

“Sit, or you will fall,” Thor teased, rumbling a laugh.

 

They sank into the pool with twin splashes, Loki's a little more abrupt as one knee wobbled. His moan of relief at the bath's temperature was swiftly followed by a scoop of water dumped over his head.

 

Sputtering furiously, Loki shook his hair out of his face to find Thor laughing, seconds before another dish of water splashed over him.

 

“How do you expect me to wash your hair if it's dry?” asked Thor, grinning.

 

Loki glared. But no matter how hard he searched, certain that he had to be missing something, in Thor's smile there was no trace of derision, merely honest amusement. Nothing said that Thor meant to take petty revenge on him, only that Thor was being his juvenile trickster self. Brows still knitted suspiciously, he permitted Thor to sit on the bench beside him and turned enough to present Thor with his back, but the sense of wrongness lingered. It was not often Loki felt that he had been unjustly harsh to someone, but it was difficult not to, in the face of Thor's open amiability.

 

“Thor,” he said, as Thor lathered shampoo in his hands for Loki's hair. “The things I said last night...”

 

Thor's fingers dug into his scalp, carding back Loki's hair to be soaped. “Aye. What of them?” he asked, only half-interested.

 

“I was... incorrect,” Loki said quietly. “About you.”

 

Though Thor was behind him, Loki could feel his frown. “Which part?”

 

“You-- you don't remember?”

 

“I remember enough,” Thor drawled. “'Stupid, self-centred.' Don't trouble yourself over it, brother. People say such things when I make them angry. In that, at least, you're no different than anyone else.”

 

Loki felt his mouth hanging open. “And you don't care?”

 

“Immortality would be torture if I carried grudges. Bad enough that others carry them against me.”

 

“But what if I'd _meant_ it?”

 

Thor's hands stopped quite suddenly, a palpable air of hurt shock emanating from him. “You did?”

 

“I didn't.”

 

The hot gust of Thor's booming laugh made the nape of Loki's neck tingle. “Then what's the problem?”

 

And the honest bafflement in his voice said that he truly could not comprehend what Loki was asking him. Thor could not see why he might remember past slights against him, why careless words in the heat of the moment might continue to matter after the fight was over.

 

Loki shut his eyes as incredulity gave way to a shudder of exhausted affection, to love that fit like an old, good leather glove, worn and comfortable and thick enough to protect from all burns and cuts. In that moment, a fear that he had been carrying for centuries loosened away-- fear of the moody fits Thor was prone to, the sullen resentment sometimes so deep in his eyes. But if Thor could not even hold a grudge over his brother for claiming that Thor shamed their father's name, then how could his hurt and anger ever ferment into hatred for Asgard, hatred enough to drive him to the heights of true vengeance?

 

At the sink of Loki's shoulders and the dropping of his head, Thor gripped Loki’s arm in concern, causing the giggle in his chest to crack free.

 

“Ah, Thor,” he laughed, raw and unstrung. “Thank the higher gods that you aren't a complex man, or this realm would be doomed.”

 

Thor snorted, baffled but amused at the slightly unhinged laughter that Loki found himself unable to stop now that it had been jarred loose. Loki was still cackling when Thor took his jaw in a big hand and tipped his head back, the better to pour water over his hair and rinse out the suds.

 

Shivers ran down Loki's back at the way Thor's fingers carded through his hair to remove the tangles. Opening his mouth to mention that there was a bottle of oil to help with that task, Loki accidentally caught Thor's eye.

 

The seiðmaðr smiled. The warmth and relaxation apparent on his face were nearly foreign. “You should laugh more, brother.”

 

“Not at your jokes,” Loki replied breathlessly. He was tripped up by the sudden intimacy of Thor's presence as he was still coming down from his laughing fit, and tried to hide it. “Really. Phallus jokes at your age.”

 

Thor's grin was unrepentant.

 

Madness seized Loki, as if he had not berated himself but ten minutes ago for asking Thor to wash him. Without thinking, he picked up the razor from his grooming kit and held it out to Thor in a flat palm, eyebrows raised in cool challenge. “Will you not finish the job?”

 

Thor's huge fingers handled the razor like a spider could fold silk. It gleamed mirror-bright in the light coming in through the glass balcony doors, and Thor's smile widened.

 

In short order, Loki found himself sitting with his elbows propped on the edge of the bath to either side of himself, chin tipped high, his jaw and throat covered with fragrant white lather. He breathed steadily as the razor glided across his jugular in long, smooth strokes, soothed by the sharp scent of the herbal oils in his shaving soap. It was not the razor that made his heart race, fast and unsteady.

 

It was the fact that Thor had seated himself directly on top of Loki, straddling his lap and kneeling on the bench on either side of Loki's thighs as his big, deft fingers guided the razor across Loki's skin with utmost care.

 

Every warm wash of Thor's breath across Loki's face made his skin tingle. He blamed the menthol in his soap.

 

Thor flicked soap from the razor and began to carefully shape the edge of Loki's beard, smirking. “If I had but known I could silence your silver tongue like this ages ago…”

 

Loki raised an eyebrow, holding perfectly still.

 

“You would have had the smoothest face in Asgard,” Thor finished, chuckling.

 

“Don't you dare,” Loki murmured, taking advantage of the handful of seconds Thor needed to rinse the razor again.

 

He drew a sudden sharp breath as Thor resettled his position on Loki's lap, their thighs pressing and sliding together for one brilliant moment. Bound to utter paralysis while in such intimate proximity, Loki felt hypersensitive in every inch of his body, the entirety of his attention concentrated on the heat and weight of the places where Thor's body touched his.

 

“Be still,” admonished Thor.

 

Loki was hard pressed to hold back a slightly desperate snort of laughter as he felt the tingle at the base of his spine beginning to coalesce into a kernel of whiter, hotter stirring.

 

Frowning in concentration, Thor shifted again, leaning in closer to better see the delicate work he was doing.

 

Was he taking off whiskers individually, Loki wondered with a touch of hysteria. And again he thought, surely Thor could not be doing this deliberately. Surely not.

 

With a huff, Thor rocked back and then forwards again, his thighs spreading wider over Loki's as he pressed closer, his narrowed eyes fixed on some frustrating bit of Loki's beard. Back-- forward, closer--

 

“ _Thor_ ,” said Loki abruptly, in the breath of space he had when Thor lifted the razor momentarily. He very nearly succeeded at bored detachment. “Could you, mm. Leave me some space to breathe.”

 

Blue eyes narrow and considering, Thor traced the tip of the razor over the curve of Loki's cheekbone.

 

Another prickle raced down Loki’s back, sharp and dangerous and good, good, nothing at all like the muzzy crackles of heat that had started to tear him down. Gaze heavily lidded, Loki managed to level a cool stare back at Thor despite the keen edge now trailing along the line of his jugular.

 

No, _no_ , it was still building inside him, the stirring of his flesh teased on by the shivery whisper of sensation and danger from Thor's razor--

 

“Loki.”

 

All that emerged was a strangled, “Hm.”

 

“I--”

 

And then silence, the widest yawning void that had ever fallen between them. Thor's eyes widened, and Loki's hips twisted involuntarily in response to the feather-light, utterly telling brush of his erection against Thor's thigh. He bit his lip bloodless in rage, but it was too late.

 

Loki's mouth twisted in a false, dismissive moue that felt as strained as it surely looked. “Brother, I--”

 

“You had only to _ask_ ,” rasped Thor, heartbeats before his mouth was suddenly upon Loki's, savage and hot.

 

Prompted entirely by the flood of jolted passion that washed through his veins, Loki arched up and responded to the kiss in kind immediately, his fists tangling in the wet hanks of Thor's hair and pulling so hard that it had to hurt. Thor only shuddered and shoved down against him, trapping Loki's cock tightly between their stomachs. Loki's sharp teeth closed on his lower lip-- reward rather than rebuke, and they both knew it.

 

Logic reasserted itself seconds later.

 

Loki wrenched himself free. “Thor, no. Stop. Think.”

 

Incredibly, Thor muttered, “Yes. Yes. I must--”

 

Seiðr rippled over him like an oil slick, the burnished orange gloss of it clinging and sinking into his skin. In a handful of moments, the face Loki himself gaping up at was a fine echo of Thor's own, with a narrower chin and fuller lips, his skin soft and clean where the morning stubble had faded away. Breasts pressed against Loki's chest as Thor gasped for breath in the aftermath, blinking with momentary dizziness.

 

“There,” Thor announced, that familiar proud grin on his unfamiliar mouth. “No shame to either of us, now.”

 

For but a handful of moments, Loki considered pointing out how vastly Thor had missed the point. As usual, he had failed to address any of the truly crucial matters at hand. Then, spurred by the reckless challenge in Thor's eyes, something inside of Loki broke loose, a hairline fracture in a wall that had been waiting to burst for centuries.

 

A manic grin taking control of his face, Loki tossed aside his half-formed protests, threw his head back and laughed, wild and loud.

 

Damn them all, anyway. He had given Asgard enough of his life. This was one chance for selfishness that Loki would not let duty take away from him.

 

( _And_ oh _, what a joke, what an excellent trick_ , purred some voice inside of him, _to flout their rules and expectations quite so deliciously_...)

 

He was Loki Silvertongue, Loki Light-as-air, reckoned of the Æsir; he could easily keep this secret and ten thousand others besides.

 

“Come here, then, sister,” he murmured, gathering great fistfuls of Thor's hair and pulling it tight with a tender smile on his mouth.

 

Thor's nostrils flared and tendons in his neck strained as he fought Loki's pull despite the pain, his lips drawing back in an expression half grin, half grimace and all teeth. Below the water, his hand pushed between their bellies and curled around Loki's cock, one warm, possessive squeeze that spoke of having every right to hold and touch as he pleased.

 

(And did he not? When had Loki ever denied Thor the right to lift his little brother in the air and carry him around as children, or to jostle close and sling an arm around his shoulders as men? How many important messages had there been in that touching which Loki, cold and more enamoured of solitude than contact, simply hadn't noticed?)

 

“Ah,” said Loki, a broken little sound just barely disguised as faint surprise. Even with his heart pounding, though, he kept his gaze cool and lidded as he smiled up at Thor. “What a pretty face. Tell me, Thor-- am I the only one who's seen this?”

 

Thor winced at the tug on his scalp. “Mother has. And Sif.”

 

“Do you and Sif braid your hair together, then? How lovely.”

 

“We do no such thing,” Thor growled, jerking Loki's length with ungentle force.

 

It startled a jolt out of his hips, an involuntary flutter of his eyelids as heat lanced through his core. His grin sharp with victory, Thor repeated the motion until Loki arched against him.

 

Trembling, Loki slid one hand out of Thor's hair and down to the nape of his neck. Thor yelped suddenly as Loki dug blunt fingertips into a deep blue line of bruise, giving his own helpless jerk.

 

“Don't toy with me, sister,” Loki breathed, gentling his touch to a stroke that threatened further pain as much as it soothed.

 

Thor laughed. “Why would I make an exception for you?”

 

His hand was now moving in firm, smooth pulls, though, so Loki deigned not to reply. Unable to keep control of his eyelids, which wanted to flicker stupidly in a way that Loki was sure never happened when he had himself in hand, he shut them entirely. It only seemed to magnify the sensations burning through him.

 

“Why, sister,” Loki gasped, “what practised hands you have.”

 

“Call me sister again and I'll pull off your stones,” Thor growled, but his voice was too high to carry the full-chested effect of his usual threats. Still, he did not withdraw his hand-- on the contrary, he moved it faster, sliding and stroking with a talented turn of the wrist at the end of each stroke that had Loki biting the inside of his cheek. He hadn't thought to ever try _that_ to himself.

 

“But are you not?” asked Loki. His thighs would have been shaking were they not locked beneath Thor's weight. “You have breasts, you have female makings between your legs. You are my dear, dear, beautiful sister.”

 

“Do not mock me!”

 

Loki yelped as the grip on his cock suddenly became painful. “ _Ah_ , Thor, _think_ ,” he said frantically, his fingers scrabbling at Thor's beaten shoulders, “why would I mock you with my manhood in your grasp?”

 

After a moment, Thor's grip relaxed, leaving Loki to sag back against the edge of the bath and fight for breath as his heart raced--  more out of fear than pain, true, but it was unsettling nonetheless. He jumped when he felt Thor begin to stroke him once again, but relaxed as it became apparent that Thor meant only to work his erection back to fullness in apology.

 

Buoyed on the pleasure that was rushing through him, it took Loki several seconds to notice Thor's suspicious silence. When he abruptly realised that his taunts may have breached the limit of Thor's patience after all, that he was being lulled into a sense of complacency, Loki snapped his eyes open, expecting to be met with a handful of seiðr in whatever unpleasant form Thor would shape it.

 

Instead, he found Thor staring at him as though he were a frightening and fascinating animal. “Do you mean that?” the Thunderer asked, in an uncharacteristically quiet tone.

 

“Which part?” asked Loki. He gathered more of Thor's wet hair in his fist, the violent gesture oddly tender, and pulled his brother closer. “Sister?”

 

He pressed a chaste kiss to Thor's forehead.

 

“Dear?”

 

He placed a second kiss on Thor's mouth, equally quick and chaste.

 

“Beautiful?”

 

His tongue flickered against Thor's teeth before prying between them with deft assurance, and he delivered a ravishing kiss that ended suddenly enough to leave Thor panting with his mouth open for more.

 

“You don't mock me,” Thor whispered, as if to himself, but the desperation in his eyes as he searched Loki's face for any hint of a lie was obvious.

 

Loki felt a familiar pang of sympathy for his brother, so unable to protect himself through concealment and untruths. What was unusual was the impulse to meet Thor's vulnerability with an equally bared heart.

 

He balked for only a moment before conceding to the impulse. Thor thought little of expressing his every emotion and idea; he would not know how highly Loki valued his feelings, and how rarely Loki permitted them to be truly known.

 

“No, Thor,” he murmured, his lips near Thor's temple. “I don't mock you. My brother. My sister. Whatever you are, you... will--”

 

A nervous flicker of his tongue over his lips--

 

“-- _always_ be dear to me,” he finished in a whispered rush, and found himself shaking from the effort it had cost him.

 

Thor's mouth descended on his again in a surge of messy enthusiasm, swallowing Loki's cringe of embarrassment at the sound of his words hanging raw and open in the air. Loki met Thor with equal fervour, glad of the chance to lose himself in enjoyment of the kiss, wet and sloppy and utterly enthralling.

 

One did not kiss a maid like that. One certainly did not kiss a lady like that. None of the women Loki had known, neither the lovers he had bedded nor the ones he had pursued only with a teasing touch or two (and oh, he knew he should not have taken so much enjoyment from frustrating them so, yet--)--

 

No. It had certainly never been like this clutching, rocking, needy thing he had with Thor, this greedy push and pull of lips and tongues and bodies that left Loki feeling obscene and utterly shameless about it. Only with Thor did Loki have this.

 

At last, Loki broke off the kiss and gasped for air, his head rocking backwards with dizziness. He wasn't sure how much of the spinning was from air loss and how much from what Thor was doing with the pad of his thumb. His cock felt blazingly sensitive, and Thor was rubbing his thumb over the head of it without mercy. Loki writhed as though Thor had wrapped strings around his joints and could play him like a puppet.

 

He was too close to his release to permit Thor such control any longer. He would not, could not let Thor have the responsibility of unravelling him completely.

 

Jaw clenched, Loki yanked on the fistful of golden hair he still held. It wrenched Thor's head back so far that his spine bowed backwards, lifting that necessary fraction of his weight from Loki's thighs. With Thor held ruthlessly by the hair, Loki thrust his hips upwards at a furious pace, rutting his cock through the tight channel of Thor's fist. He used Thor for his own pleasure as thoroughly and unapologetically as Thor had used him the night before.

 

A brother's hand, an offer to help from the one person who would not, _could_ not deny Loki  anything-- how could he not take advantage of that rare and precious thing, that gift which was his and his alone?

 

Finally, with a shudder and a sudden, loud gasp, Loki spent himself in the tight heat of Thor's hand, head jerking forward with the force of it. His hips bucked a last three times, a frenetic spasm in the sinew-snapping rush of release, and then he fell slack, panting open-mouthed and wrung.

 

As Loki sighed and sagged back against the edge of the bath, Thor took it in with hungry eyes, devouring every inch of the sight as though it sated something urgent in him also. His hand continued to move gently but relentlessly along Loki's softening length, without mercy in its intent to strip every last ripple of release out of Loki.

 

Though Thor's calluses were suddenly too rough against his oversensitive flesh, Loki only let out a low hiss and revelled in the white-edged almost-pain burning along his raw nerves. Sometimes excess was the only option. It would burn the memory of this into his soul in a way little else could, so that he would always, always remember what it had felt like to leap from Yggdrasil and die (if only a little bit) at Thor's hands.

 

“Get yourself off,” Loki murmured, his eyes low-lidded. “I want to see it.”

 

Thor grunted in surprise.

 

Loki raised a challenging eyebrow.

 

Then, only _then_ did a flush ruddy Thor's library-pale cheeks. The seiðr around him unravelled like a veil being ripped aside and his generous breasts melted back into flat pectorals.

 

Still kneeling over Loki, Thor hunched down in the water while he jerked his cock as if to hide the rapid pull of his fist, the way his hand had practically shot to his desperate erection the moment Loki had given the order.

 

Amused and delighted, Loki kept his eyes fixed on Thor's face to take in every detail with merciless interest even as Thor stared determinedly at a point somewhere over Loki's shoulder, red-faced. The older man seemed full of humiliation, stifled anger and wrenching arousal at the same time. But embarrassed though he was, Thor was still doing as Loki had told him to, was he not?

 

What _was_ it about the situation that Thor suddenly found so improper, Loki wondered. He would of course have to ensure that it happened again, as often as possible.

 

Digging the nails of his free hand into Loki's shoulder for balance, Thor came with a yell that echoed around the chamber-- more than around the chamber, Loki realised, when he heard thunder rumble on outside even after Thor's noise had stopped. He rolled his eyes.

 

Red-faced and panting, sweat beading on his forehead from the heat of the bath combined with his exertions, Thor looked the picture of disarray. His wet hair was plastered against his face, tangled where Loki's fists had been, and his scarred lips were swollen from Loki's teeth.

 

There was a very real vulnerability about Thor, the way he looked at Loki as though he did not even _know_ that he was leaving the wreckage of himself exposed and unguarded. It made Loki uncomfortable and angry on a level that he could not even begin to fathom.

 

And.

 

And something else, something Loki did not understand. Possessiveness? Deep and welling, an emotion so purple-black and rich that possessiveness seemed a pale name for it, but Loki had no idea what else it could be, what visceral shade of affection or fraternity he might be feeling.

 

Weakness did not inspire the urge to possess, to cherish as if the weak thing were of value, and yet--

 

“Did you like that, brother?” demanded Thor, trying to cover his embarrassment with bluster even as his hands still shook. The unsubtle sneer in his voice was meant to shame.

 

Loki was not ashamed.

 

“I did,” he said. “Thank you, Thor.”

 

Thor gave him a baffled look. Loki merely smiled enigmatically.

 

Behind Thor's back, he twitched his fingers… pulled on the sinews of a heartplace long buried. Power curled up from inside of him, aching like the stretch of a muscle too little used, but at the same time, it was the sweetest ache Loki had ever felt.

 

(How could something so wrong feel so right?)

 

Winter glossed from his veins in a faint pulse.

 

Loki traced his fingertips against the muscles of Thor's beaten back, icy cold against the throb of bruise-hot flesh.

 

Thor's whole body jerked at the touch. He attempted to twist around to see what Loki was doing, but Loki caught Thor's jaw in his other hand, keeping his brother's face away from his cold hand.

 

Who knew what it looked like? His skin sometimes turned blue on the rare private occasions that he attempted his untrained ice magic, and the thought of Thor seeing that--

 

“But you don't work seiðr,” was all Thor managed.

 

“I don't work seiðr,” Loki agreed neutrally, and spread the flat of his palm across Thor's back in soothing circles.

 

Thor stared at him for several long moments, his mind visibly blanked. Then, just as the first thread of fear curled into Loki's stomach, he swooped in and kissed Loki soundly on the mouth, big hands cupping Loki's face.

 

The blue of Loki's skin crept slowly farther and farther up his arm, and neither of them saw it, with their eyes shut tight as they melted into one another.


	10. Chapter 10

Asgard did not know what had changed in the relationship between its two princes, but all saw the results. Some marvelled. Others cursed the day a pair such as Thor and Loki had ever laid claim to their places in the court.

 

The time when Asgard's princes had unintentionally crossed and contradicted each other was no more. Though Gungnir's might and Hliðskjálf's heights were still very much Odin's and Odin's alone, Thor and Loki had power of their own, and suddenly, it seemed, they wielded it _well_.

 

They spoke more often, quiet murmurings in each other's ears, small gestures and glances across the table before they answered questions. They responded to slights against the other's honour or patience, where before Thor had been wont to sit back and smirk as Loki grew testy with the courtiers, and Loki prone to ignoring the insults Thor was dealt.

 

Jointly, they were a force to be feared. All of the fumblings of their past behaviours were gone, leaving only action and reaction: stripped, efficient and perfectly ruthless in a way that well bespoke Loki's control, underhanded and mocking in clear hallmark of Thor's influences.

 

Thor provoked, and Loki listened to the results; Loki planned, and Thor enacted.

 

When there arose threats and dangers to the provinces of Asgard, the God of Lightning now rarely handled them himself. What had once been his job, and the All-Father's before him, was passed on to the Thunderer.

 

Some spoke ill of Loki for that, displeased at the sight of a warrior avoiding battle. Nonetheless, Loki continued to handle the court as if he did not hear the whispers behind his back-- as if he did not sense Odin's hard stare upon him-- and still had enough political power amassed behind himself that his image could stand to take a few blows.

 

Though nobody noticed, it helped that on some nights, a golden-haired maid would slip through the mead halls and taverns, perching on warriors' knees and drinking with them. _But Loki has always been distant_ , she would argue, whenever the topic came up from warriors who felt slighted by Loki's behaviour. _And whenever he behaves oddly, does he not always have a plan? The minds of rulers work in complicated ways, beyond our ken. This isn't an act of cowardice, you'll see. He has a plan_.

 

“You are not subtle,” Loki told Thor acerbically, but the lines of stress around his eyes looked less deep.

 

And as it went on, fewer and fewer bitter tongues found themselves able to argue against their seiðmaðr of a crown prince when his seiðr was so often used to stem floods and control blazes, to ward cities from disease and slay beasts which threatened villages.

 

Loki ordered, and Thor obeyed.

 

Aye, many days Thor still spent ranging far from the palace, Sif and Fandral by his side, but when Loki called, he went where directed.

 

 _How easily Thor heels to his brother's wishes_ , it was said, and Loki, his cool face composed, would feel the deep bite marks on his chest and shoulders rub against his fine clothing with a thrill of raw and delicious pain.

 

“It's something to do, at least,” said Sif, which was as close to praise as she would come for anything Loki did.

 

For the first time in two centuries, the envoy who delivered a new trade agreement to Álfheimr for signing was not Loki but Thor, who met the birch-slim king beneath Ýdalir's living vaults with a dagger-edged smile, just _daring_ anyone to give him fuss. Somehow it took over a month to get the papers signed. Thor never explained satisfactorily how that could be so, but Loki imagined it had something to do with the rumours that swirled through Asgard upon their return.

 

To hear tell, Fandral had flung most of his armour and furs off by the end of the first whirling dance and bedded half the Ljósálfar court in one exultant night, to say nothing of what he had accomplished with the rest of his time there. Sif had spent nine days and nine hours in the private grotto of the handmaidens of Andlàngr and emerged with a new kind of calm strength about her, though she refused to speak of what had finally ended the constant hopeless hungering for approval that had haunted her eyes for years. Thor had laughed and sang and recited epic tales and caroused with the courtiers of Ýdalir every night, drinking 'til long after even his prodigious tolerances were strained, from the sheer joy of being around people who did not care that seiðr flowed in his veins.

 

Five years after the end of the war, Thor returned to Svartálfaheimr to dine with the blacksmiths in their rebuilt cavern forges. His mere presence, his scarred lips smiling over the rim of his cup, worked better than any silver words Loki could have crafted to rub in the smiths' faces that they were indebted to Asgard for five years more, on paper, but centuries more in practice.

 

And if the dwarf Brokkr was found slumped dead over his anvil the day after Thor departed, nobody could prove anything.

 

“You fool, of course they know it was you,” Loki hissed, tearing at Thor's dust-streaked robes. His own armour fell to the ground in clattering pieces as Thor pried it loose with hasty fingers. “You're a seiðmaðr, you could easily have delayed the death by a mere handful of hours! They would have known it was you even if he had died a year later!”

 

“Thank you for giving me the opportunity, brother,” Thor crooned, utterly without remorse and far more intent on nuzzling the soft flesh behind Loki's jaw.

 

“I should have known better than to expect you to be more subtle about it,” Loki muttered irritably, just before Thor tossed him onto the bed and cut off conversation for the rest of the night.

 

The name of thunder was no longer an empty one. Blunt and heavy-handed, the crown prince was, wicked and unmanly, but powerful. Thor was Loki's smiling and handsome threat, a warning that whomever the trickster came to visit had Loki's attention in a dangerous way. Laugh as he might, Thor's eyes never ceased to be dangerous, his fingers never entirely still or empty of seiðr, and all knew it. Yet at the same time, Thor could as easily be the hero that Loki sent to save that same person from the next trouble that befell him.

 

Frigga alone saw what Loki truly saw inside of Thor: not a threat or a weapon but _potential_. She saw it too. The makings of a fine king were within her eldest son, the core of goodness and strength and honour that promised great things from Thor, no matter how flawed with impatience and short-sightedness that unrefined core was.

 

True, the promise of Thor's kinghood was more deeply buried than it was in Loki, whose narrow shoulders had very nearly grown ready for the mantle he did not want-- the mantle which her jötunn changeling-son was still unlikely to ever inherit, no matter how ready he ever became or how worthy his claim-- but it was there.

 

And, Frigga knew, Loki was nothing if not talented with the hammer he wielded. The shape of Thor's raw potential was safe in the forge beneath his brother's hands.

 

And so it went.

 

*

 

“I do not know whether to be furious or ashamed of you,” Odin said, his single eye crackling with electricity.

 

The worst possible scenario leapt instantly into Loki's head and his stomach dropped with a sickening lurch, down to what felt like the pits of Niflheim. Still halfway bent over the table of papers and treaty proposals, he stared up at Odin, who had just strode into the room carrying a palpable aura of anger like a mantle over his shoulders.

 

“What is it?” was all he managed, his mouth dry as sand.

 

“Did you think I would not notice that you've been using your brother as a tool?” snapped Odin.

 

Relief made his knees weak, tainted as it was by incredulity. “For his own benefit,” Loki protested, almost unable to believe that he had to explain himself to Odin. Did the All-Father not see what he intended?

 

“How will he become a king if you lead him by the hand all his life?”

 

“How will he become a king if he is left to his own devices?” demanded Loki in return, his voice climbing louder to compete with Odin's thunder.

 

Cold anger had flooded into his insides, exchanging places with the nausea, grounding and focusing him to a single sharp pinprick of intent. After everything he had done for Thor, how could this be the response he received?

 

“You _know_ how Thor is,” Loki accused. “He doesn't think!”

 

“You do not give him the chance to! Have you so little faith in him?”

 

A horrid, fractured laugh broke from Loki's throat. Disbelievingly, he asked, “Have you so much?”

 

“Thor deserves more respect than what you give him.”

 

“I respect him.”

 

“You treat him like a child!”

 

Feeling as though his joints would break if he moved, Loki stood stock still and stared at Odin, his heart knotted in his throat. His vision swam at the edges as betrayal crept over him like a slow, icy tide.

 

“Then what was the point of all this?” he asked, his voice damnably shaky, and how, _how_ was Loki to convince the All-Father of his use if he could not even speak properly to his face?

 

Ugly words clotted in his throat, shoving up from the deep wells of his heart to voice thoughts far better left unsaid, and Loki could not stop them.

 

“You-- you took me from Jötunheimr all those years ago, and raised me as a second son, and now you tell me not to play the only role I know? What was the point of _training_ me so if I was never meant to actually _do_ anything?”

 

“I didn't take you so that you could learn to stand in Thor's shadow,” Odin said.

 

“Not even that, then!” Loki cried, in a voice half laugh and half wail.

 

He cast his gaze frantically about the room in an attempt to drain the tears that had welled up in his eyes, desperate not to have them fall before the All-Father and the ne'er-forgetting stare of his ravens.

 

“But of course you don't want a jötunn standing so close to the throne,” he continued viciously, loathing himself as much as Odin in that moment and using that hate to burn back all his weaker emotions like deadwood before a blaze of balefire. “Who knows, I might be able to influence even honourable Thor to monstrous ends.”

 

“I meant you for _more_ than this!” roared Odin, with a suddenness and savagery that stunned Loki. “I meant you to unite Asgard with Jötunheimr and bring about true peace, not to spend your days eternally smoothing the way for a boy who should be man enough to forge his own path by now!”

 

Rigid with shock, Loki stood blinking dumbly at Odin, hardly able to be grateful that his eyes had drained and left him with some semblance of dignity, despite the redness that rimmed them.

 

Taking in Loki's stunned expression, Odin seemed to lose some of the anger that had made him into such an untouchable force, a great and terrible king whose sheer power precluded such petty things as fatherhood and family. He was left a man once more, a parent, now white-haired and venerable, older in that moment than Loki had ever seen.

 

“Why must you always twist my words so?” Odin asked softly, his single eye sad. “Does it please you to hurt yourself with them?”

 

Loki stood in silence, his jaw locked. He had words, words in excess, but he dared not open his mouth for fear that the wrong ones would spill out, acrid and ruinous. _Then why do you not put me on the throne of Asgard_? churned within him. _Could I not bring about peace that way? Have you not just said I am more fit to be king than Thor? I do not_ want _the throne, but if I could fulfil the sole purpose for which I exist by taking it, then let me_ take _it, and I will suffer it as I have suffered all other things to be the son you wanted_.

 

But at the same time, he knew that there could never be a jötunn on the throne of Asgard, and he knew that suggestion to be madness. _I know, I understand, father, truly I do_ , pleaded another voice inside of him, frantic for approval. _I know I will never be king-- only do not separate me from Thor, do not take this purpose from me and cast me aside, do not, I beg you, do not..._

 

 _But I cannot abandon Thor. He needs me_ , said another tiny voice, and that was all there was to that argument.

 

Odin let the silence stretch to horrible lengths, choking Loki with the expectation that he speak. Finally, however, the All-Father shook his head and turned to leave the room, his sigh vaguely disappointed.

 

“Do not ever let me find that you are using Thor for your own ends,” was all he said.

 

“Yes,” said Loki's mouth bitterly, before he could stop it, “we can't have _both_ princes of Asgard pursuing nothing but their own desires.”

 

Odin merely cast him a last inscrutable look and walked away.


	11. Chapter 11

And now, so many centuries later, with the weight and breadth of more than two millennia shared upon their shoulders, with all past things measured and taken into account in the shaping of the selves they have come to be, Loki and Thor are here.

 

Odin has put off the Sleep for many decades, so many that he breathes heavily and Frigga's face grows tight with worry in the moments when she believes no one is paying attention. Loki cannot fathom why--

 

No. Loki _had not_ been able to fathom why Odin so adamantly refused to rest, as though there were some urgent thing that needed doing before he let the Sleep take him. What matter, Loki had thought, could be so important and yet still unknown to Loki?

 

Then Odin had finally announced the coronation.

 

A fire crackles low in the grate, reminding Loki that he has been awake for many hours longer than he had planned. His eyes burn with overuse and the paper he has been reading blurs before them.

 

There is a knock at the door. “Come in,” Loki calls, for the few people who would dare to disturb him at such an hour of the night are all welcome. Perhaps Baldr has had another nightmare.

 

Hogun enters, a heavy bundle of scrolls beneath his arm. He does not fetch and carry for anyone save Loki and Baldr-- and of course for Frigga and Odin, if they asked it, but not with the same willingness as he does for the younger princes. Certainly not for Thor.

 

“The list of ceremonies,” Hogun says, setting down the scrolls on a side table already well burdened with books. “And the legal contracts.”

 

Loki looks at the ancient scrolls with tired eyes. There are so many of them.

 

Hogun sets something else down on his desk, his expression brooking no dismissal. Loki cannot help but blink in vague surprise at the flask and the plate of the moist, dense cake squares which Loki often favours.

 

“I will see to Baldr if his rest is uneasy tonight,” Hogun tells him bluntly. The gesture is both unexpected and unsubtle: _so you need not stay awake very much longer_. Without another word, Hogun turns and leaves on soft feet.

 

Loki does so appreciate Hogun's ability to say what needs to be said and nothing more. It is refreshing to have a companion that speaks without guile, even if guile is Loki's own vocation. And Hogun _is_ a companion, the only one in all of Asgard that Loki finds more than barely tolerable. He thinks Hogun may feel the same of him, for it was the Dökkálfr's own choice to stay in Asgard rather than returning to Svartálfaheimr, and he has so few contacts other than Loki. Their mutual understanding of this it tacit, and that, too, Loki appreciates.

 

As anxiety crawls up on him again, Loki takes one of the cake squares and picks it apart, his fingers moving with a viciousness that speaks to his frustration barely suppressed. Distracted, he licks a smear of honey off his knuckle.

 

Two minutes later, half the plate is gone. Loki thumbs a crumb from the corner of his mouth, mildly surprised at how much better he actually feels with something in his stomach. He had thought he would be too wound up to eat.

 

He sits. He stands. He paces. He curses himself and turns back to his work, tedious though it is, and the fire burns lower.

 

There is much to be done before the coronation.

 

Some small hours after midnight, Thor slides into the room like a breath of cold air. Loki knows he is there by the way the lifting of the hairs on the back of his neck, and jerks his head up sharply just in time to see Thor melt out of the shadows.

 

“Get out of my sight,” Loki orders harshly, turning away.

 

Damn him, Thor is _grinning_ , bright and sharp and self-satisfied.  In this mood, he will listen to none of Loki's warnings.

 

“I could almost think you didn't like my trick, brother,” he says, eyes glittering. “Was it not an excellent jest?”

 

Loki feels like a wolf being prodded with a sharp stick. “It was stupid, cruel and destructive!” he snaps, whirling back on Thor. “Have you any _idea_ how many years of war you might have brought us, how many lives you endangered, how-- how many _laws_ you broke?”

 

“Only one!” Thor protests.

 

“The most important one!” explodes Loki. “Thor, you brought a _jötunn_ into the palace!”

 

With infuriating calm, Thor shrugs, “Brynhilde said she wanted a husband worthy of her.”

 

In that moment, Loki thinks he could murder Thor.

 

“You ignorant, brainless--”

 

“Loki--”

 

“-- _child_!” Loki spits. “Baldr has more sense than you! How you can still call yourself a prince of Asgard--”

 

“Save your breath, brother,” says Thor. “Father has already said all these things and more.”

 

“You're lucky he didn't disown you,” Loki growls.

 

His hands start to shake again at the memory of Odin's face as Thor had stood laughing before Brynhilde, the roar from Odin's throat that had sent everyone in the mead hall scattering in fear of their king's wrath. Against Loki's protests, Frigga had grabbed Loki's arm and pulled him from the hall. His insides had been frozen solid with fear for what would become of Thor after facing Odin's fury without Loki to keep him in check.

 

And if Thor had been disowned-- worse, had been stripped of his powers, or even banished--

 

Loki is only glad that he doesn't have to find out what he would have done in that eventuality, even as he is furious that Thor wasn't punished to within an inch of his life for such sheer thoughtlessness.

 

When he gets his hands on the crop again, he is going to redefine the meaning of the word pain for Thor. He is going to break Thor's pride in two and make Thor beg him to stop, and then ignore him; he is going to whip Thor until Loki is sure that Thor will never, never think of Jötunheimr again without feeling phantom pain in his bones. He will see that Thor knows the agony Loki felt when he thought he was about to lose his brother for good.

 

Loki takes a deep breath, trying to stop himself from shaking. “How could you have thought for a moment that it was a good idea, Thor? If you had come to me--”

 

But Thor is shaking his head, laughing low in his chest. “How mightily you protest, brother. I'm not fooled.”

 

“This isn't a joke, Thor.”

 

“But it was!” Thor insists, slipping nearer with dark amusement in his eyes. “And you may have hidden it from everyone else, Loki, but I saw it. You enjoyed it.”

 

“I did no such thing.”

 

“You did.”

 

Grinning, Thor tries to slide his hands around Loki's waist. Loki hits him in the stomach, but Thor only grunts and pulls him closer.

 

Rigid with fury, Loki stands still as Thor nuzzles into his throat, fighting against the way Thor's touch makes him want to throw Thor down and kiss every inch of his skin, mark every muscle and bone with bruises and ownership, make frantic love to Thor out of sheer relief that Thor is still here, still his, still safe in Asgard. He will not let himself be swayed by Thor's charm.

 

“'Tis so difficult to make you laugh these days, brother,” Thor murmurs. “The lengths I go to to amuse you-- it seems I never see you smile unless I can startle it out of you by being cruel, and then only for a moment.”

 

“So you thought tormenting Brynhilde in front of the entire court would do it?”

 

Thor pushes him up against his desk, and the shape of his smile presses into Loki's neck. “It did.”

 

“And then it nearly got the casket _stolen_ ,” Loki snaps, his ire making itself freshly known.

 

He shoves Thor away, only for Thor to grab his wrists and push him back a second time, laughing. The desk scrapes loudly against the floor. His face twisted with rage, Loki brings his knee into Thor's stomach. Thor lets him go with a whoosh of lost breath and staggers back a few steps.

 

One hand on his stomach, Thor stares at Loki. The laughter has finally died from his eyes.

 

“I thought you would be pleased,” he says in a wounded tone, his face the picture of hurt confusion.

 

“Pleased,” Loki repeats, unable to believe his ears. “Why in Hel's name would I be _pleased_ by you leading a jötunn into Asgard?”

 

Thor's next words knock the world out from beneath him.

 

“I have no idea why father waited so long to choose you as his successor,” Thor says, frowning. “T'was obvious that I'm not as suited for it as you. Don't you understand, brother? I had to make him see that I could never be the king you would. Making you laugh was but a happy bonus.”

 

And Loki cannot _breathe_.

 

Numb with shock, he lets Thor cup his jaw again and kiss him. His brother's tongue slips easily past his slack lips, stroking and gentle across Loki's palate. As if sensing Loki's state, Thor handles him like something fragile, cupping Loki's skull as he pushes Loki back over the desk for a third time. Papers rustle and fold beneath their weight.

 

“Fool,” Loki whispers against Thor's mouth, but his voice is weak. “There were _reasons_ \--”

 

Thor grunts his dissatisfaction, as though he is utterly certain that Odin, who once split himself upon Gungnir's shaft for the wisdom of the Nine Realms, could not possibly have had reasons good enough to satisfy Thor. “I'll be glad when the coronation is over.”

 

Loki digs his nails into the back of Thor's neck, summoning enough strength to regain some of his control. “And what of you?”

 

“What of me,” Thor repeats, his incredulous mutter muffled against Loki's bearded jaw. He draws back to look Loki in the face, baffled. “I will be as I always have been. Yours to command.”

 

Loki shudders, his hips jerking up against Thor's. The trust, the blind _faith_ that Thor has in him, as if it had never occurred to him that assuming a life of subservience to someone else might be dangerous… but of course Thor could not fathom that, as king, Loki would have to actually punish him for his misdeeds, or that Loki might one day be forced to send Thor to his death in battle.

 

“Did you not want the throne for yourself?” Loki asks, almost desperately. _There is still time to fix this_ , something in the back of his mind says with a touch of hysteria, _Thor can still be king, there is not truly going to be a jötunn on the throne of Asgard, of course not_ \--

 

Thor's expression is dark. “Do not mock me,” he mutters. “I am no king.”

 

The laugh that escapes from Loki's throat is broken. That is _not_ the lesson Thor was meant to learn from all these years of rebukes, but there is no denying the sullen tone that says he does not appreciate Loki rubbing in his deficiencies.

 

Loki's stomach gives a lurch. It is sinking in now, at last, that this is really going to happen. He could almost cry. At last he has been given some show of Odin's approval, a sign that the All-Father somehow trusts Loki with the kingdom despite his jötunn blood, and all Loki can think is that he isn't even sure if he can even bring himself to accept it.

 

He has never wanted to rule. He has only ever wanted to be useful enough that he is loved.

 

But now he has no choice but to rule, with all its assorted responsibilities and miseries and irritations, because Thor will not help him out of this. Because Thor thinks Loki will be a good king.

 

Unable to speak, Loki kisses Thor again, this time more fiercely. Thor groans his appreciation, leaning more of his weight down on top of Loki. The edge of the desk digs into the small of Loki's back, but the kiss is warm and soothing and pleasantly wet, enough to drown out some of the myriad worries that have been filling his head for the last day.

 

Loki senses movement near his left ear and jerks in annoyance. He whips Mjölnir out of his belt and flips it onto the desk right next to his head, mere inches from Thor's fingertips.

 

“Oh, no you don't, brother,” he murmurs against Thor's mouth, as the trickster growls his displeasure. “You're not running off with that.”

 

“There were only going to be a few small changes,” Thor mutters irritably. “You're going to get an entire coronation, Loki. Can't you let me have a few moments of amusement?”

 

“I think not,” Loki replied, biting Thor's lip to distract him from the scroll of ceremonies he's trying to pull from beneath Mjölnir. “I imagine you'll manage to amuse yourself anyway.”

 

Unashamed, Thor hums his agreement. His hands are pulling at Loki's belt.

 

Loki grabs one wrist to stay him for a moment. He raises one eyebrow at Thor. “Just-- no more jötnar.”

 

Thor's laugh is a great and booming thing. “That I can do,” he chuckles. “They weren't very pleasant to work with the first time.”

 

It sends a cold tingle down Loki's spine, but nothing more, and his feeling of trepidation dissipates swiftly enough at the heat of Thor's mouth.

 

They don't bother to disrobe entirely, pulling at only the buckles and fastenings that are necessary. Loki still has half-formed thoughts of making their way back to his bedchamber. Pushing himself up from the desk, he gets one hand around Thor's length, meaning to give Thor a few teasing strokes and then quickly make for his bedchamber, so that Thor has no choice but to follow. Instead, Thor bites down on Loki's throat in response, his hips shoving forward demandingly.

 

Loki curses, shoving Thor off of him entirely. Even the highest collar of his formal robes won't cover a mark there. Thor must know this, for he's laughing.

 

The contents of his desk are in chaos. Dreading the potential for getting semen all over the contracts he just spent the last four hours filling out, Loki moves to sweep them together. Suddenly, Thor is latched onto him from behind, his fingers digging into Loki's hips as he pushes Loki down against the desk again.

 

" _What_ is your obsession with this desk?" demands Loki with true irritation, struggling against Thor's weight.

 

The hard bulge of Thor's erection against his lower back is difficult to fight, though, and more difficult yet when Thor manages to push down Loki's trousers. Loki wants to protest against the indignity of being bent bare-assed over his desk, over the armful of contracts that will make him _king_ , for Ymir's sake. It is destroyed by the hot surge of arousal that burns through him at the feel of Thor's cock pushing hard against his ass.

 

"Don't you _dare_ ," Loki snarls, fighting against the choking desire that rises up in him.

 

He cannot, _cannot_ allow himself… that. He would be ruined if anyone ever found out. He thinks he might be ruined by merely the frustration of having his desires fulfilled once but never again.

 

Thor grunts against the back of his neck, and though he still holds Loki down, breathing heavily against his shoulder, he doesn't try to take Loki as a woman. He hasn't even teased at doing so since that first day in the bath. Thus, Loki is both relieved and frustrated beyond belief when Thor guides his cock into the channel between Loki's thighs, one hand clamping down on Loki's left thigh to push his legs tighter together.

 

There is a mutter and a sudden warm wetness on Loki's inner thighs. He has but a moment to realise that it is not Thor's premature release but a sloppy magicking of oil, and then his noise of outrage is drowned out by Thor's satisfied growl as he begins to thrust.

 

The sounds Thor’s cock makes as it slides between Loki's thighs are obscene. Pinned beneath the weight of Thor's forearm bearing down on his shoulder blades, Loki lets himself collapse fully against the desk. He sinks his teeth into a knuckle of the fist that he's formed. Heat races up his spine, curls low and tight in his loins.

 

The position should hardly be satisfying for him-- Thor hasn't even got a hand on Loki's cock-- but all Loki can imagine as Thor ruts furiously between his legs is what it would feel like to have Thor inside of him, taking him, ruining him in the most perfect perversity ever. The mere sensation of Thor's hips rubbing against his buttocks fills Loki with heady arousal.

 

He wants to be conquered like a fortress, stripped down and spread open; he wants horrible things, shameful things. The issue is not ergi—

 

No, that is a lie; part of the issue is still that Loki cannot stand the thought of somehow being made less of a man than he already struggles to be. But the thing that truly chokes his heart and sends shame creeping down his spine is that Loki is to be a king, and surely no king should want to be so submissive to another. Surely this is wrong. Loki cannot stop his insides from crawling with horror at the thought that _if Odin knew_ \--

 

And yet something inside him cries that to be taken would give him such _power_ , such control over his partner. Some other part of him only wants to be fucked, without justification or explanation. It makes his face flush and his manhood hang painfully hard between his legs, untouched, as Thor's stones slap against the backs of his thighs.

 

Loki's knuckle is swollen and painful by the time Thor finally comes with a yelp of surprise, an abrupt release on the withdrawal of a thrust which splashes hot against the back of Loki's thighs and rump. At the sensation of semen dripping down the crease of his ass, Loki has to bite down so hard on his knuckle that his spine arches involuntarily.

 

Heaving like a winded ox, Thor collapses on top of him, his chin digging painfully into Loki's shoulder blade.

 

Loki's whole body throbs with need. He doesn't know what frustrates him more: that Thor is on top of him, or that Thor is on top of him and not moving any longer.

 

The force of the desire that grips him is-- terrifying. Loki does not, has never responded well to terror. He buries it beneath the self defence of savagery. Very suddenly, he goes from laying quiet and still beneath Thor to lashing out with his elbow in the soft place beneath Thor's ribs.

 

His brother lands on the floor with a whistling gasp of agony. The sight of Thor knocked back on his rump with his trousers around his knees brings a hard smile to Loki's face, a sense of cruel satisfaction.

 

( _What is wrong with him; why is he sometimes so horrible? He is a jötunn, he cannot be fit to rule_ \--)

 

Then he remembers his resolution to beat Thor senseless, and why. The insulted shock on Thor's face at being tipped over with such indignity suddenly justifies that treatment and more.

 

Despite the mess between his thighs, Loki draws his trousers back up so that he can stand with a semblance of composure, his clothing disturbed only by his cock, jutting hard and long from his open fly.

 

He grabs a handful of Thor's hair and drags him up. The pull is just slightly too fast for Thor to get to his hands and knees properly, and Thor fumbles on his way over to Loki, wincing as Loki jerks painfully on his scalp. Loki knows that Thor would gladly have come over, even crawled over, if Loki had given him a few more seconds, but he didn't want to give Thor the chance to come willingly. That chance is the difference between having fun with each other and punishing Thor, and he must make Thor know which is happening now.

 

Thor does not entirely mind when Loki pulls his hair, either. That annoys Loki, because it means that Thor partially enjoys what he is meant to hate, but there's nothing Loki can really do about it. He must compensate with other small miseries.

 

On his knees in front of Loki, Thor reminds him, “Mine is not the silver tongue.” Still, his eyes are glittering with anticipation.

 

“Pity,” Loki says, without any. “Do try to make it passable.”

 

He is well aware that Thor's mouth is more than passable, but that's not the point. It sends another thrill of smug satisfaction up his spine to push his cock into Thor's mouth before Thor can sputter a reply. Thor's outraged response turns into a few garbled syllables and a surprised choke around Loki's girth. This, too, is pleasing.

 

Thor's eyes narrow in a glare, which Loki returns with a look of bland indifference. Still, Thor regains his balance quickly and begins to suck in earnest, his tongue working determinedly against the head of Loki's cock.

 

With the fist still tangled in Thor's hair, Loki pushes his head up and down in an unhurried rhythm, content to let Thor do most of the work but still needing to remind his brother that Loki is hardly pleased with him. The indignity of having his mouth used like a copper-piece harlot is mostly what Loki wants to inflict. Judging by the irate redness of Thor's face, it is working.

 

Now and again, when it appears Thor is beginning to enjoy himself too much, Loki has to pull sharply on Thor's hair and change his pace without warning. He suddenly thrusts deeper into Thor's mouth, hard harsh thrusts of his cock that leave Thor gagging for a few moments as he struggles to adjust. When Loki hauls Thor's mouth off his length entirely, it is purely so that Thor knows he is permitted to breathe only at Loki's desire as well.

 

It confounds Loki beyond belief that Thor does not fling him through a wall and storm out. But night after night, time after time, Thor lets himself be used and taunted-- and often beaten, but that is entirely different. Thor asked to be whipped; he enjoys it. What can it possibly be that makes Thor put up with the way Loki takes his frustrations out on him, and torments him out of the petty cruelty that sometimes seizes Loki? It's hardly abuse, it's just-- _spiteful_ , and why does Thor let Loki do it?

 

(Loki pities Thor for his inability to deceive. He does not know that Thor pities him for his inability to be selfless for those he loves, to even comprehend that kind of giving.

 

Above all else, Thor is a mountain that weathers all storms, and does not blame his brother for raging against him-- for who else should bear out Loki's fits and outbursts but Thor? He takes it all with a kind of good-humoured willingness and does not let Loki's temper offend him personally. To tell the truth, he does not mind so very much. His shoulders may be lean, but their bones are broad, and must have been built strong for a reason.)

 

As his loins grow tighter, Loki uses Thor even more roughly, taking his mouth without consideration. He wrecks Thor's throat, leaves his lips reddened and swollen.

 

Tears gather in the corners of Thor's eyes-- strain, pain, distress, Loki does not care. That is all he wanted to see.

 

The anger drains out of him, leaving only the pressing need for release. The sight of Thor on his knees, moving his head in restricted jerks to please Loki as best he can despite the grip on his hair, makes it all too easy to tip the rest of the way over.

 

Legs shaking with desperation, Loki shallowly thrusts twice, three times more, the head of his cock sliding slick and hot against Thor's tongue, and spends in Thor's mouth with a shaky gasp. His whole body shudders in the aftermath. Thor gives a muffled groan but stays still, lets Loki hold him in place until the aftershocks have faded and Loki can unclench his fist from Thor's hair.

 

Before Loki pulls out, he feels the muscles of Thor's mouth working around his softening length as Thor swallows. It leaves him gasping with unexpected instability when Thor finally pulls off and looks up at him. Loki’s defences are momentarily cracked wide open and exposed for Thor to see through.

 

Thor's swollen mouth forms a smile, his eyes giving no hint that he sees even a hint of Loki's utter vulnerability. He looks nothing more than sated and satisfied, assured that his cooperation has pacified any anger that Loki had against him and that he is once more in good standing with Loki. Of course Thor thinks so-- he would respond that way, and he still cannot imagine Loki doing differently.

 

And Loki finds that he does not have the strength to dismay Thor by proving him wrong. He cannot now look down at his brother and tell Thor that this had changed nothing, that Loki is still furious with him.

 

Not since the actions that infuriated Loki so were Thor's way of-- of willingly surrendering the throne to him.

 

For him.

 

Thor gets to his feet with a sloppy grin, waving a careless hand. His clothing rights itself, and Loki's inner thighs are suddenly clean and dry. Loki manages a thin smile of gratitude.

 

“So tomorrow you are king,” Thor says in a low voice, his eyes cutting into Loki.

 

The thought spoken aloud sends a lurch through Loki's stomach, terror and elation both. He gives a short, startled laugh. And then, for the first time, Loki finds that he is able to feel the anticipation, the pride and _delight_ he should have been feeling all along.

 

It is as though a star is starting to rise in his chest, hot and light as air.

 

Yes. Yes, tomorrow, he is to be _king_.

 

A wicked smirk cuts across Thor's face. “Your _majesty_ ,” he mocks, fist to heart, making an exaggerated bow.

 

Loki shoves Thor's shoulder, his laugh coming more easily than it has in years. “You know I can have you whipped for disrespect, now,” he tells Thor lightly.

 

Thor's grin is savage and dazzling. “I will, of course, accept punishment for my misdeeds without complaint.”

 

Loki snorts in amusement, accepting that he walked into that one. The brief fantasy he entertains-- of actually handing Thor over to the captain of the guard for punishment, as is standard procedure-- turns into a more serious consideration that he tucks away for later. Right now, he has other concerns.

 

“Come, brother,” he says. “I need to check that Baldr is sleeping well.”

 

“He is not sleeping at all,” Thor chuckles, as they head towards the door of Loki's chambers. “He swore he would not go to bed until he had given you his congratulations. Mother is beginning to grow quite short of patience with him.”

 

“Well, then,” Loki says, a true smile unfolding across his face, “we must not keep him waiting any longer. I think this has been long enough in coming as it is.”

 

-End-


End file.
